Reading Lists

These poems about collective movements told from individual perspectives are essential to our understanding of resistance

Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash

Poetry has always been a cartographer for me, the way to start scratching out a map when I am lost.

When I was working on my book, Something Small of How to See a River, I really* *wanted to find other contemporary poetry books directly from movement and activism spaces. I had been a guest in the beautiful Indigenous Water Protector movement in Standing Rock, where I helped organize a school for the kids who lived at the camp. When I returned home, I didn’t know how to make sense of the experience I’d had: the joys and the sense of community and the land alongside the intense state violence—and, in the end, the pipeline that did run through Lakȟóta land and beneath the river. Through poetry, I was trying to figure out how to process this experience, to see if there was a way for me to write my small corner of this very big story.

How did other poets balance the delicate tension of writing about a collective movement from an individual perspective? How did they process the successes and failures? How do they see the role of art within activism? I didn’t know much poetry directly from these spaces—but I expected to find it easily. Yet, I kept coming up with crickets. While the tradition of the protest poem is powerful and ever-present, I haven’t found much traditionally published poetry that comes from direct, personal experience on activism’s front-lines. (Although I do believe that within movements, people know who their poets and storytellers are).

This makes me even more grateful for the incredible books listed below. I strongly believe that these poetry books are essential to our understanding of resistance. In the face of facism and oppressive state violence, they give me not fragile hope, but imagination, resilience, and a re-centering on our interconnectedness.

Bittering the Wound by Jacqui Germain

Bittering the Wound is a deep and careful storytelling that comes directly from Germain’s experiences during the Ferguson uprisings. Germain has a continuous focus on protest as a form of love: for one’s community, for one’s ancestors, for Blackness, for oneself. The city is alive, the streets are alive, the protestors are alive and embodied—and they are all asking the question, “How do we care for each other when we live in institutions of violence?” It’s a book that insists both on the deep trauma and violence that occurred and the community care that is woven into every moment. I really appreciate Germain’s focus also on what happens after a big movement—when the cameras leave and organizers and activists are left to deal with the trauma, with the intimate aspects of a very public story. (Also, huge shout out to Germain for recommending several of the books on this list to me.)

It Ain’t Over Until We’re Smoking Cigars on the Drillpad by Mark Tilsen

Tilsen is a Lakȟóta poet, organizer, and educator who was deeply involved at the Oceti Sakowin Water Protector Camp and is truly a poet of the community. His work holds the small and distinctive details of folks working together to survive and resist—the helicopters spinning overhead, the “donation tent couture,” the trips to the casino to use the, ahem, facilities—with deep heart, asking “let me be fearless/just one more time.” It also asks the reader to show up—to not just read about a movement space, but to become a part of it, to join the resistance. He writes, “Put on your orange coat/Use the ear plugs when offered/let the medics take care of you/if you forget to take care of yourself have someone remind you.”

Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam

Villainy is a very bodily, queer exploration of grief and protest. Ab-Karam writes directly from the sites of activism and struggle, most especially the protests against the Muslim Bans of 2018. Karam is also deeply critical of the traditional publishing model and poets “writing about the riot from a youtube video” and it shows in the way the book refuses any traditional model of what a poetry book should look or sound like. Some pages include just a single line (“I WANT A BETTER APOCALYPSE THIS ONE SUCKS”), while some are in large blocks of all caps. A thick layering of sensation, ideas, repeated phrases (“this myth is hard on on the body”) build like wheatpaste posters, a complicated and collective insistence on survival and resistance and queer community care.

*Motherfield *by Julia Cimafiejeva

Cimafiejeva writes from Belarussian protests against the dictator Lukashenko. Like in Abi-Karam’s work, there’s a constant pushing against language and what it can express in extreme political circumstances. The book finds two different approaches: the first half, a straightforward prose diary of the protests and the brutality of the regime; the second, a collection of lyric and slightly surreal explorations of Belarus and the very idea of homeland. The two sections play off each other like reflections in a lake, grounding the readers in the specificity of the violence and then providing the strange mirror only poetry can—a wry, and weary, but still almost playful examination of what a person owes to her homeland, what a poet owes to her homeland, and what that homeland owes to her. She begins one poem: “A poet’s body belongs to his motherland/motherland speaks through the poet’s mouth” and ends it: “No, you don’t need the body of a poettess/It’s mine.”

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Brandy Nālani McDougall

McDougall’s gorgeous book centers on Native Hawaiian life and connection and resistance. It’s an active re-making, re-imagining—a reminder that Hawaii has always been an Indigenous place. Many poems in the collection come from McDougall’s experience at Mauna Kea, in resistance of the telescope planned for this sacred Hawaiian mountain, where the “sky is so thin, / thinnest of all skins come to stitch / a new story.” Her poems, threaded deeply with Hawaiian language, highlight the work of this Native resistance, of bringing one another food, water, and medicine, of putting one’s body on the line for the land. While the book acknowledges colonial violence, it always holds a deep sovereignty and love.

Hong Kong Without Us edited by The Bauhinia Project

I’ve never read a book that pushes against the commodification of poetry quite like this. Hong Kong Without Us is essentially an anonymously written and edited anthology from the youth-led Hong Kong protests against Chinese authoritarian control in 2019-2020. The editors, who refer to themselves as the Bauhinia Project, gathered submitted work, poetry they found written on walls, and even Facebook posts, bringing individual voices together into a searing collective chorus. There’s a constant desperation present among the primarily young poets, but also a strong sense of desire to care for and protect others. One seventeen year old writes, “I’m sorry Hongkongers,/I’m just a high schooler/the cops are stronger than me,/ I couldn’t protect anyone/but I could smother canisters/of tear gas for you.”

When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal edited by Celes Tisdale

In 1971, men imprisoned at Attica (some for infractions like driving without a license or a forged check) organized a tent city in the prison yard, where they petitioned for their basic human rights. The uprising ended in a brutal massacre: 32 inmates and 10 guards were murdered by the police. Shortly afterward, Celes Tisdale began teaching poetry workshops at Attica. This book is a collection of the men’s poems, as well as reflective journals from Tisdale. There’s both a cautiousness and a bravery present here—in the way both Tisdale and the men feel the constant surveillance of the prison and the way they continue to tell the stories anyhow. In “13th of Genocide” Isaiah Hawkins writes “The clouds were low/when the sun rose that day/ For the white folks were coming/ to lay some black brothers away.” There’s also an incredibly moving focus from the men on tender moments from their childhood, especially the love of their mothers, an insistence on the gentleness they deserve, the humanity the carceral system works so hard to deny them.

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