You know how it is: when you aren’t the church-going type, but find yourself at Sunday service anyway—maybe you’re visiting your grandma, or maybe it’s Easter—and the pastor says, “I invite you to share the peace with your neighbor”, and everyone around you unexpectedly turns and greets the person seated to their left, and then the person seated to their right, and the rando in the pew in front of you turns around and says, “Peace be with you”, and you’re, like, “Um, yeah, same.” This is what’s called “passing the peace”, and it’s a common ritual in most Protestant churches. 

This consecrated yet deeply impertinent (to introverts) church tradition symbolizes the unconditional love, unity, and forgiveness God calls on each of us to offer to the assholes we live with every day.

Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems is nothing like passing the peace, thank God.

If the poems do any sort of emotional labor, it’s to make you feel reverent, probed, discomfited, gratified, or possibly even literate (beautifully illustrated in Kaveh Akbar’s poem that kicks off the collection). But the poems will not forgive you. The whole point of pairing a poem with a reflection is to demonstrate how deep reading—reading that makes you do the work to engage with a poem—is the narrow path when it comes to enjoying poetry.

Okay, yes, there is love in these pages. There is love on every page, actually, but it is the love of craft on display in the poems, and the love of the love of craft on display in the reflections. No accidental, come-one-come-all congregation; each of these fifty poems has earned its page (most are one-pagers), and each reflecting poet has something unique and beatific to say about their choice poem.

• Haryette Mullen relates the significance of historical context to Liu Xiaobo’s poem “For Su Bingxian.” 

• Fanny Howe demonstrates virtuoustic how-he-did-it-ism in Carl Phillips’s “Parable.”

• Carl Phillips turns around to offer fandom to Danez Smith’s poem “gay cancer” for being “the slyest sonnet ever.”

• On Wiliam Stafford’s “Vita”, Jim Moore offers a confession of personal inspiration. 

• In Susan Stewart’s “The Forest,” Jennifer Grotz notes the form reflecting the content.

• In Tomas Tranströmer’s “From An African Diary (1963)”, Seshadri sees a call for help and a path
• to redemption. 

• Stephanie Burt finds one way of finding meaning in life in Monica Youn’s “Hangman’s Tree.” 

• Diane Seuss shares an off-hand comment about a student who got a tattoo of a line from D. A. Powell’s “Boonies.” 

• In Seuss’s own “I once fought the idea of the body as artifact,”, Erika L. Sánchez admires the playfulness, and in envy says what we all always say when we’ve read something awesome: “I wish I had written that.”

And on it goes. There is no blurbese here, just artistry, reverent and probing and discomfiting and gratifying artistry. If, as Sophie Cabot Black said about Jason Shinder’s “Eternity,” “Poems are ultimately about poetry,”, then consider these fifty reflections about fifty poems as poems in their own right.

Brian A. Salmons lives in Orlando and writes essays, poems, and plays, which can be found in Qu, The Ekphrastic Review, Autofocus Lit, Stereo Stories, Memoir Mixtapes, Arkansas International, and other places.

Find him on IG @teacup_should_be and Twitter @brianasalmons.