*

I will forever be in second grade    acutely aware my classmates’ gold star
reading comprehension    voices sliding over words like snakes slither grass
great at self-flagellation    no one can hurt me like me    I deserve my
teachers’ neglect    my classmates’ sneers and taunts    I am not good enough
pretty enough    smart enough    to learn to read    each day my failure
reteaches me    the depths of my inabilities    my (dys)abilities
                                                                 

**

When I turn thirty, I still stumble aloud, mind ever split
between recognizing letters and

processing meaning, in tandem. What’s wrong
with me? stings the old shame.

I continue to try and out-chess my falterlurch,
my vocal careen, but I also lift

my chin and push my pawn
two daring spaces forward:

I ask myself how
do I think,

how do I get the
answer.

  

***

 

This year, I question friends on their hows of reading
and understanding. My classroom curse word 

reading comprehension is examined,
thought through, discussed.

Epiphany lands casually
one Tuesday afternoon:

reading out loud,
with ease and grace,
has nothing to do
with understanding.

  

****

 

It took me all these years to divine this    travel outside my own head
shame and into others’ vocality    others’ processors and understandings   

so I write this to remind myself to smile    when others read smoothly
and smile when I falter for you here and now    because
when I read    I comprehend    

  

by Sarah Shapiro

You can hear Sarah read the poem here.

The Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress is excited to share with you a poem from another one of its new pamphlets. After we featured ‘Love Token’ from Jennifer Lee Tsai’s Kismet last week, this week’s offering is from Sarah Shapiro’s pamphlet The Bullshit Cosmos. The pamphlet will be available later this month and will be launched in London on 22 July and in Oxford on 23 July. Please join us to celebrate the launch of Sarah’s pamphlet and the pamphlets by Joanna Ingham and Jennifer Lee Tsai. Sign up here  for the launches. 

Don’t forget that we recently launched our International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here .

Sarah Shapiro was born in Chicago and lives in Somerville, MA. She is a poetry MFA candidate at University of Massachusetts Boston. Sarah also holds an MA in Place, Environment, and Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a BA in Environmental Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Sarah’s academic career was not a guarantee; she grew up with learning (dys)abilities and did not begin to read until the age of eight. Now, her poems for this project explore the gap between those who read with ease and those who struggle to read.

Sarah believes that as many people as possible should have access to reading and writing poetry. She teaches university analysis and writing at Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Boston, undergraduate writing and the environment at UMass Boston, and an itinerant writing workshop at the Osher Longlife Institute for adult education at UMass Boston. She has completed a residency with Cove Park, and had an audio-text poem published in TIMBER. Her poems have also appeared in glitterMOB, SheGrrrowls, Bunbury, and Poetica Magazine.

The Bullshit Cosmos is a highly distinctive pamphlet that celebrates triumph over adversity, defiance against the system, success over predicted failure. The poems explore the gap between those who read with ease and those who struggle to read. Honestly written, they provide a starkly refreshing approach to our language in a poetry that is provocative and challenging, compassionate and engaging.

ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press from Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets, and established poets working on interim or special projects.

Our latest pamphlets are by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro, and they will be published in July 2019. The first five pamphlets to be published by ignitionpress: There’sNo Such Thing by Lily Blacksell, AHurry of English by Mary Jean Chan (Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice, 2018), Glean by Patrick James Errington, Shadow Dogs by Natalie Whittaker and Small Inheritances by Belinda Zhawi, are available from our online Shop. Each pamphlet costs £5, and you can buy three for £12. You can find out more about the poets and their work on our dedicated page.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.