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Gr 9-Up This memorial to the lynched teen is in the Homeric tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite formal not only in form but in language. There are 15 poems in the cycle, the last line of one being the first line of the next, and each of the first lines makes up the entirety of the 15th. This ch...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

Emmett Till's murder by white racists in 1955 was so brutal that his mother let his tortured body testify to the ugly facts in an open-casket funeral. Attempting to capture the immediacy of such an unspeakable act in the format of young adult picture-book poetry and from the distance of a half-century dares much. Nelson represents the story in a complex heroic crown of sonnets, a sequence of fifteen interlinked sonnets in which the last line of one becomes the first line, sometimes slightly altered, of the next, and the last sonnet is made up of the first lines of the preceding fourteen. The elegant formality o...Log In or Sign Up to Read More