Ashley M. Jones, Hieu Minh Nguyen and Others Join an NPR Bouquet

Kaveh Akbar, Fatimah Asghar, Ada Limón, Hieu Minh Nguyen and Ashley M. Jones are among those featured at NPR Books for the tail-end of National Poetry Month. "Their work covers everything from immigrants' lives to connecting with animals to the ache of a mother lost too young," write Karen Grigsby Bates and Kumari Devarajan. From "A Bouquet of Poets":

Ashley M. Jones wrote a provocative poem called Slurret. "It's a Shakespearean sonnet which is comprised mostly of slurs used against black people, " she explains. "It's also sort of a retaliation against the literary canon, and the traditional sonnet form."

Slurret

You a spade, a spook, an open-mouthed
black pickaninny. Ashy Aunt Jemima,
Americoon, you blue-gummed Beluga,
you cotton-picking jigaboo. You, drenched
in chicken grease, you watermelon head,
you tar-skinned porch monkey, ain’t never gonna
get a job, you yes suh shuck and jiver,
you hanging tree baboon—for years, we watched
you bleed beneath our skin-splintering whip,
we watched your eyes embolden, swell like veins.
You turned your begging hands to thick brown fists.
What are you made of? What fabric sustains
its fibers, stays elastic despite rips—
embossed with flame, but a brocade remains.

Jones says the poem uses "all the trappings of the oppressor "— iambic pentameter, a rhyme scheme.

"It's a sonnet in every way, except it's not talking about the fair maiden, or a rose, or any of the other non-political white subjects that sonnets were written about in the past. Instead, it's attacking racism and elevating the black experience to this level of art."

Read on at NPR.