Transgressive Poetics in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom
by Ronnie K. Stephens
The case for dangerous poetry in class.
For you if
you believe what gets pulled from classrooms is exactly what kids need most
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In a moment when teachers are being handed lists of things they can't teach, Ronnie K. Stephens argues that poetry is the most defensible and most dangerous thing you can put in front of students. Transgressive Poetics is a structuralist map of early 21st-century American poetry — received forms stretched past breaking, invented forms, erasure, the deliberately unreadable — paired with concrete classroom strategies for teachers who've been told to be careful. Tiana Clark's sestina pushing against structural injustice. Danez Smith bending the rondo into something impossible. This is the book that helps educators stop apologizing and start teaching.
Where This Book Lives
Stephens came to this work as a poet first — three collections and a PhD in English from UT Arlington — so this isn't education theory from a distance. The classroom activities are practical and field-tested. Primarily for educators, but any parent who wants to understand what gets lost when poetry gets sanitized will recognize exactly what's at stake.
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