The poets anthologized in Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America bear witness to, rage against, and defy the misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and authoritarian impulses that have always surrounded us, but that are incarnated in the 45th president. At a time when large swaths of the nation, and of the world, have succumbed to a reality television ontology, the poems collected in this volume offer the terra firma of imaginative empathy only available to us through poetry. This anthology contains work from a variety of aesthetic stances, from poets whose personal backgrounds reflect the vibrant multiplicity of our democratic vistas at their most resplendent. These voices counter alternative facts and fake news with the earned communion and the restorative utterance of the lyric and of the narrative. Proceeds from this anthology will be donated to The National Immigration Law Center.

Contributors

Hanif Abdurraqib - Kaveh Akbar - María Isabel Alvarez - Eloisa Amezcua - Nin Andrews

William Archila - Fatimah Asghar - Chaun Ballard - Zeina Hashem Beck - Bruce Bennett

Rosebud Ben-Oni - Brian Brodeur - Joel Brouwer - Nickole Brown - Tina Cane

Cortney Lamar Charleston - Jim Daniels - Kyle Dargan - Danielle Cadena Deulen - Natalie Diaz

Dante Di Stefano - celeste doaks - Martín Espada - Joshua Jennifer Espinosa - Blas Falconer

Kate Falvey - Brian Fanelli - Ariel Francisco - Christine Gelineau - Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Jennifer Givhan - Tony Gloeggler - Ruth Goring - Sonia Greenfield - George Guida

Luke Hankins - David Hernandez - Luther Hughes - Kenan Ince - Maria Melendez Kelson

Ruth Ellen Kocher - Dana Levin - Timothy Liu - Denise Low - George Ella Lyon

J. Michael Martinez - Shane McCrae - Sjohnna McCray - Erika Meitner - Rajiv Mohabir

Faisal Mohyuddin - Kamilah Aisha Moon - Abby E. Murray - Susan Nguyen - Matthew Olzmann

Annette Oxindine - Gregory Pardlo - Craig Santos Perez - Xandria Phillips - Kevin Prufer

Dean Rader - Stella Vinitchi Radulescu - Julian Randall - Camille Rankine

Alexandra Lytton Regalado - Alison C. Rollins - Alberto Ríos - Liz Rosenberg

Nicole Santalucia - sam sax - Lauren Marie Schmidt - Scherezade Siobhan

Raena Shirali - Clint Smith - Patricia Smith - Maggie Smith - Christian Teresi

Leah Tieger - Vincent Toro - Leah Umansky - Emily Vogel - Joe Weil

Jameka Williams - Phillip B. Williams - Jane Wong - Javier Zamora

Gerald Locklin (1941-2021) was born in Rochester, NY. A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, he published over a hundred books in his lifetime, including The Firebird Poems (Event Horizon Press), Go West, Young Toad (Water Row Books), Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet (Water Row Books), and Down and Out (Event Horizon Press). The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in the English Language calls him a central figure in the vitality of Los Angeles writing. From 1965-2007, he was professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. He lived in Long Beach, CA.

John Amen's Dark Souvenirs was prompted by the suicide of his uncle, Richard Sassoon. Amen seeks clarity around Sassoon's death while expressing grief over the sudden and violent loss. The poems, however, quickly expand to include imaginative leaps, Amen diving into broader familial and cultural dynamics. In various poems, Amen recasts Sassoon as his brother, his son, a stranger he meets in random places, and a teacher who graced him and the world with a unique brand of wisdom, madness, and humor. Throughout his sixth collection, Amen navigates stunning imagery, memorable declarations, and language that shimmers with signature musicality.

The poems in Worn Smooth between Devourings travel through fears of ecological devastation and national and global tragedy, and map routes away from despair. Worry remains in the background, even in landscapes that still hold time's beginning. Even in long love. We are suspended in places / entire and different and home, Camp writes. These precise, sonically-driven poems investigate a confessed gaze for contentment with the conviction of quiet rebellion. Through repeating distance, multiplying birds and crisscrossing storylines, they offer a testament to land and lack, grief, faith, and endurance.

Heeding St. John Cassian's call, The Third Renunciation rejects classic depictions of divinity and religious dogma to see God more fully. Each poem begins with a proposition (e.g. Say God is the music we strain to hear), or an explanation for a Biblical story (e.g. maybe Jesus was having an off day). Henry's poetry offers answers to the myriad whys at the center of faith and doubt, gives voice to the notion that both singing and screaming are authentic responses to suffering, and argues that grace is a Twinkie or a cockroach-/something that never goes bad, can survive/anything the cold world throws.../ despite all our best efforts to quell it.

Dancing Room Only is a wild romp into the forgotten center of our people. With his signature rollicking style, a keen sense of humor, and an acute ear for dialect and voice, Reese archives the sinners and saints that haunt the Midwest and beyond. Author Kent Meyers writes of Reese's work: In these poems, ordinary life with its children and neighbors crackles like a mirage, and shifts and opens, and we find we've been all along in San Quentin prison. What is it we just saw?-a five-year-old child swinging on the monkey bars, or a tattooed convict, crying? Reese's eye is the eye of a father, and he finds his world both alien and comforting. These are poems of praise and poems of warning, infused with love and latent violence. Reese makes us feel the threat throbbing inside the song. In Dancing Room Only: New and Selected Poems Reese is a well-traveled troubadour with Midwestern sensibility, and as the author of three widely-praised books of poetry, he knows how to blow our hearts sideways.

What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List is an invitation to notice the world around us and appreciate its gifts. Heffernan pays homage to the loved ones who have shaped her world view, and the poets who have inspired her to express that view. A firm adherent to Jack Gilbert's declaration that we must risk joy, Heffernan invites readers to do exactly that--even while recognizing grief that often goes hand-in-hand with gratitude.

And So I Was Blessed weaves together three narrative strands: a tourist visiting Viet Nam, a son sojourning to his father's village in the Mekong Delta, and a professor leading his students on a term abroad, all for the first time. Running throughout this poetry collection is the refrain of the central character--the tourist, son, and professor--missing the daughter he left behind. This is a book about history and memory, tourism and education, arrival and departure, loss and alienation, longing and misrecognition, and above all, a father's love for his daughter.

At the intersection of religion, politics, and Americana, Colin Pope's latest collection inquires what it means to believe while living through unbelievable times. These poems careen and rollick, imagining a world in which conspiracy theory and urban myth figure as acts of God. Here, the notion of blind faith is subjected to kaleidoscopic interrogation in a madcap, whirling, unabashedly entertaining pursuit of the limits of dogma. In Pope's vision of belief, wayward children are plucked up by eagles, the moon landing is faked via the liberal use of shaving cream, and a men's room wall is elected president. But beneath their roiling surface, these poems surge on their dauntless quest for some understanding of how we ended up here, now, fighting for our humanity.

Alongside We Travel is the first literary anthology to gather over two dozen poets from Canada, the United States, the UK and Israel whose lives are intertwined or affected by the autism spectrum. Included in this anthology are poems from tutors and teachers, aunts and grandmothers, friends and siblings, and from poets with autism themselves. Most of the work here is by highly accomplished poet-parents of autistic children written in a variety of traditional and experimental forms. But be warned. Much of the work articulates the despair, guilt, anger, as well as the joy that arises from engagement with such a complicated and diverse disability. As the editor Sean Thomas Dougherty writes, I can only hope the range of these poems teaches you, the reader, what they have taught me, the editor, about my own autistic daughter, about art, and how we can be brought together through language towards love.

In Man at the Railing, the 2022 winner of the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award, Edwin Romond explores how joy and loss join hands across our lifetime. Drawing upon his family experiences, his four decades in public education, and his love of music and baseball, Romond's poetry suggests the past can be a teacher as well as a source of both inspiration and anguish. Man at the Railing is the work of a seasoned poet viewing the world and his place in it with clear eyes and a beating heart.