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    Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25
    Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25
    Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25
    Ebook222 pages1 hour

    Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25

    By Naomi Shihab Nye

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    They are inspiring talented stunning remarkable wise

    They are also fearless depressed hilarious impatient in love out of love pissed off

    And they want you to let them in.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 23, 2010
    ISBN9780061992070
    Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25
    Author

    Naomi Shihab Nye

    Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared widely. She edited the ALA Notable international poetry collection, This Same Sky, and The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Paintings from Mexico, as well as The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East. Her books of poems include Fuel, Red Suitcase, and Words Under the Words. A Guggenheim fellow, she is also the author of the young adult novel Habibi, which was named an ALA Notable Book, a Best Book for Young Adults, and winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award as well as the Book Publishers of Texas award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Naomi lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Michael, and their son, Madison.

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    • 3/5
      3Q, 4P, senior, YA - Many of the poems are rough carvings of what they might be with more time or perhaps more life experience. However, despite their limitations, there are a few poems that are quite wonderful and their collective angst makes the collection worth having in one's YA collection if for no other reason than they show young writers that one can write an imperfect poem and be published.
    • 5/5
      Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye, is a wonderful collection of unique, distinctive poetry. The book is organized by poet, and each of the 25 (actually 26) poets have written four poems. The back of the book, under Notes on the Contributors, has a little hilarious blurb on each poet, making this collection even more human-feeling than the poems alone have made it. I loved this book; I thought this collection was wonderfully chosen, and all of these poems were beautiful and incredibly written. Sometimes reading a good poem hits something in you so suddenly, you don’t even know what got hit, and that’s what happened to me with many of these poems. As a person under 25, I thought they captured the feelings and thoughts and moments of young people very well. These poems are so raw and true that you can almost feel the experiences and lives behind them. My favourites were Mackenzie Connellee’s “suggestion” and Emma Shaw Crane’s “poem for my name”.

    Book preview

    Time You Let Me In - Naomi Shihab Nye

    INTRODUCTION

    If you drive old farm road 43 from Corpus Christi, Texas, up to Driscoll right at dawn and for the thirty minutes or so afterward, through the tiny towns of London and Petronila, past the cotton gins and weather-beaten farmhouses and few stop signs and blinking red lights, past the mysterious old tractors, some shrouded under tarps, some parked right where they stopped working, you’ll sometimes see a soft haze or mist. A vast horizontal cloud of fog in all directions, rising from the amazingly flat earth into the air, but hovering—as if the old fields are breathing. The breath connecting earth and sky . . . after a quiet, mysterious night of winking stars and wind from the bay, the fields are turning over in their rumpled soil beds. The breath of the ages is rising. And you are inside it.

    There is something so companionable about this mysterious time of day, which I first witnessed as a twenty-three-year-old, driving to conduct poetry workshops at H. M. King High School in Kingsville. Those hopeful silent fields could almost signify an entire coming-of-age period of life. Magical awakening, a little spooky, doesn’t last long—sometimes difficult on the vision—did we miss the turn? Are we on the right road? Late teens, early twenties—we feel our childhood possibilities realizing themselves in whatever experimental first jobs we find and awkward/graceful moves we make, earth and sky so connected. We tell ourselves, Take a deep breath—hold on—will we be able to do it? Will adulthood welcome us, too, along with all our friends? Where are they right now?

    We pause even when there isn’t a rest stop—what can’t we stand to leave behind? What astonishing surprises are about to unfold? How will language carry us along, rolling, rolling, on the old blacktop, as we pull onto the shoulder for a moment of pause and observation while all the speedier cars and pickups barrel by?

    Reading the poems for Time You Let Me In reminded me of the sensation of vast horizontal breathing. The voices of these wonderful writers open up into whole worlds of roots and rumpled sleep and radiant dreaming. There’s hope here, and humor, and snazzy intelligence. No matter what age we are, we need these voices. I remember my own son teaching me how to use a computer—when he was three—and think of how these sharp poets grew up in a sizzling world of computer and high-tech information—for sure—but they’re still timeless in their passions, interests, complications, and devotions. They have much to report and remind us of. As the writer Sandra Cisneros once said, we all carry all our ages within us—somewhere deep inside in there, every older person is still seven . . . and seventeen . . . and, we might wonder, is it possible we’re all carrying an eighty-year-old, too?

    There’s a grapefruit stand at Driscoll where trucks from the Texas Valley unload huge mountains of fresh citrus daily—succulent ruby red grapefruits, perfect plump oranges, a new kind of giant lemon—onto crooked wooden tables, into cardboard bins. That’s the feeling of being in one’s twenties, sometimes—so much to pick from—how will we do it? If we buy this entire sack of grapefruits, will we be able to eat them in time before they spoil? Can we give half of them away?

    Poet Anna West wrote,

    We crave the sweet: the honey, sugar, kiss

    of berries on our tongue—a happy thought

    to wash the sensors of our brains with bliss

    and push aside the trampled feelings brought

    about by twinges of remorse, regret

    when looking at the empty hive.

    Anna West also wrote,

    I want to eat the melancholy I

    can feel inside my ribs, beside my heart.

    I want to eat the sad . . . 

    I love these lines for their potency and full-on claiming of experience—no standing back opinionating or pontificating. Just a deep dive into sensations of being alive—songs of presence extending in all directions.

    There has never been a shortage of hope and change for young artists and writers under the age of twenty-five. It’s their currency—to experiment, penetrate layers and realms and eras and elements, participate in many directions, discover what is coming next. Moderation can wait—plenty of time for that later. Now’s the time to be an explorer inside the rich hours. When we’re lucky enough to risk expressive endeavors, no telling what will happen next. We’re rooting for life, stumbling, picking up what we find when we fall.

    We never realized how beautiful we were then, a slightly older friend said to me recently, looking through a box of fading pictures. I was stunned to see her at twenty-one, cascading long hair and flowered dress, grinning widely into the camera. We never feel beautiful at all. We feel lumpy, disheveled. And look at us—we were all so beautiful.

    One writer I communicated with, Lauren Jensen, wrote that, alas, she had just turned twenty-six, so her poems wouldn’t be eligible. She said, The project sounds, well, cool. I really like the concept of bringing ‘young’ writers together as at times it feels we should be existing/writing from somewhere we are not. For a few weeks this winter I felt I became a forty-year-old man filled with wit, heartache, and a closet of herringbone . . . I missed my overalls. I missed my hair. And, what was I saying? Maybe just how I like that you’re carding at the door, creating a space for young writers to be young, and together . . .

    Carding at the door—made me laugh—come on in, whoever you are. In a time of dire economic downturn and worldwide nervousness about all things financial, writing and reading remain the cheapest arts—and they’re portable, too. May your interest continue to exceed your investment.

    Whatever age we are, we need to figure out how to keep letting one another into our worlds. What will change? Everything. Better world. Richer fields. Fuller harvest.

    Naomi Shihab Nye

    San Antonio, Texas

    Nicole Guenther

    Photons

    I said wouldn’t it be amazing

    to be the last bit of light

    from a collapsed star?

    he said what?

    I said wouldn’t it be

    amazing? mused

    light has to stop

    coming at one point

    a stream cut off. tilted

    back beside him

    almost blind walking this dark

    road I

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