Bibliotherapy

Li-Young Lee evokes a coming-of-age between two cultures through the three of the most intimate aspects of cultural identity––food, family, and language.

Persimmon, in Li-Young Lee’s poem, is both a food and a word: an English word for a Chinese food, a product of two cultures much like the speaker of the poem. The poem tracks a coming-of-age tale through an associative logic, bringing together the feeling of foreignness in an elementary school classroom, connecting with a first love, and caring for an aging parent through the motif of the persimmon.

Natalie Díaz’s poem will resonate with anyone who has worried about losing a loved one to drug addiction.

Natalie Díaz’s pantoum uses repeating lines to tell a miniature story about a hallucinating son and a distraught mother. The two characters inhabit different worlds while they share the same sense of mounting desperation over their failure to connect. As Díaz depicts the scene, the son’s delusion that the Devil is after him transforms from a drug-induced psychosis to a frighteningly apt metaphor for the way his addicted state appears to his family.

Natasha Trethewey evokes the dreamlike world of childhood memory in a handful of repeating lines and stark, devastating images.

Natasha Trethewey uses the pantoum, a poetic form made up of alternating pairs of repeating lines, to describe a childhood memory of near-archetypal resonance: a father silhouetted in the doorway, turning to leave. The poem’s dreamlike atmosphere captures the feeling of separation so powerfully involved in the bedtime rituals of young children, while the imagery of light and dark alludes to the mixed-race Trethewey’s complicated relationship with her white father, poet Eric Trethewey.