RESISTANCE AND REUNION: THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION OF THE AMERICAS

Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press is an anthology that seldom wavers. Its insistence is on return and reunion, on making the shattered parts whole. Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu prefaces this collection of poems, which marks Curbstone's twenty years of publishing. The volume burns with torches the exiled Menchu en visions lighting up the farmhouses of her country when she returns: Torches of pine to light the footpaths, / the rocks, the cliffs, and the fields (15). Coeditors Alexander Taylor and Judith Ayer Doyle define as part of their mission to present who give voice to the unheard in a language that goes beyond denunciation to celebrate, honor, and teach (inside back cover). Poetry Like Bread represents thirty-seven Curbstone authors, showing their range of political engagement and literary accomplishment. The collection also shows Taylor and Doyle's commitment to a diverse range of literarily eloquent and politically informed voices that might not be heard through mainstream or even liberal publishing efforts, such as Julia de Burgos of Puerto Rico, who only had two books of poems published during her life, the Guatemalan guerrilla Otto Rene Castillo, the Chilean Teresa de Jesus, and the newcomer Edgar Silex. This collection shows the editorial concern to publish poet-activists? both men and women?from all of the Americas; it is a full chorus of writers working in the field and working for change in the world. Martin Espada's foreword provides the framework for the book and for the field. It also provides an expanded and necessary definition of the difference between poetry of political tes timony and poetry of political imagination. Espada defines a poetry that is not separate from the change we inaugurate in our lives. He asserts that the poetry of political imagination often starts with witness, with the bardic obligation to curse as Terrence Des Pres defines it in his discus sion of William Butler Yeats as a political poet in Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics in the Twentieth Century. However, the poetry of political imagination moves beyond apportioning blame and naming the oppressor and includes also the bardic obligation to bless. Unlike Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forche, a recent anthology of the poetry of witness that almost exclusively foregrounds military history and atrocities, Poetry Like Bread includes the act of witness but moves beyond to the life lived; it insists on that life. Nothing can be more political and more necessary to imagine. Espada asserts that the poetry of political imagination does not turn away from suffering or oppression but has two arms, one of them holding stories of resistance, portraits of activism, testaments to personal survival, and hope for the future and for the lives of the individual and the community fully lived and rendered. This poetry does not present the poets or the people who appear in the poems solely as victims; rather, it portrays the full range of their responses to suf fering. The theme of resistance is central. Poetry of political imagination, then, is written by