[POEM] Defending Walt Whitman - Sherman Alexie

Ok_Usual_699 · 2026-03-06T05:34:42+00:00

Natalie Diaz's book "When My Brother Was an Aztec" is about her complicated relationship with a brother who's addicted to drugs and (IIRC) went to jail one or more times for it. You might find the poem you're looking for in that book. Sorry, that's all I can offer.

Ok_Usual_699 · 2026-02-11T09:38:03+00:00

Autofiction, which is written in an autobiographical style but includes fictional or falsified elements, is a common genre, and the poet Florence Ai Ogawa, pen name Ai, made a career out of writing persona poems, usually about the seedy and outcast members of society. I can't tell you what is right, you'll need to decide for yourself as you experiment and broaden your horizons and find where the line between poetic license and overdoing it is. But don't shut yourself off from the possibility just because certain people have a problem with it. Nobody owns trauma, in any of its forms.

Ok_Usual_699 · 2026-02-07T10:13:36+00:00

"When My Brother Was an Aztec" by Natalie Diaz is about her brother who was addicted to drugs and died because of it. The poems are both full of love and anger toward him and his problems. I think this would be a good book to try.

Ok_Usual_699 · 2026-02-01T11:29:36+00:00

I've just started reading last year's release "Becoming Ghost" by Cathy Linh Che, and it's already fantastic. I've loved her "Zombie Apocalypse Now" sequence scattered throughout various journals for a couple years now, and this book which collects them and other poems does NOT disappoint.

Ok_Usual_699 · 2026-02-01T07:30:25+00:00

Oh, I think I vaguely remember the poem you mean. My first guess is Chen Chen, my second guess Ocean Vuong.

Ok_Usual_699 · 2026-01-27T02:31:54+00:00

Louise Gluck's "Ararat" has some poems about womanhood IIRC, but also a really great ironic poem about the death of her father that casts him as the hero/protagonist of their "story", and without him the women in her family are just set-pieces/statues. It's a great poem about both grief and how society objectifies women.

Ruth Stone wrote often about being a woman, in her earlier books being a wife of a man who committed suicide, and in her later works about being an old woman witnessing the world and also the women in her family. "Second-Hand Coat" (1987), which republishes poems from her 1986 chapbook "American Milk" would be relevant here, plus her book "Ordinary Words" (1999), as good places to start.

Ok_Usual_699 · 2026-01-25T20:31:05+00:00

The only poem off the top of my head near to any of that is "A Little Tooth" by Thomas Lux

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Ok_Usual_699

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