Bøker utgitt av Riot in Your Throat

Avoiding the Rapture is a collection of poems about survival-surviving childhood, religion, and the ways girls are taught they should behave. Karen J. Weyant opens the Rust Belt to the reader and shows them what life is like there: hard and grizzly, but with hints of tenderness and hope. We meet troubled boys and adventurous girls, we meet the survivors of a difficult life, we meet those who are scraping by and those who aren't. This collection shows that even the difficult can be beautiful, that even the hard can contain softness. Ultimately, this collection shows the reader that to survive, one must be willing to fight for it, but if they do, they're rewarded with a lush and vibrant life.**¿¿Karen J. Weyant dedicates Avoiding the Rapture, "to all the Rust Belt girls" who did as the title suggests: survived looming fear of physical bodies of the righteous ascending to heaven. Weyant distills, in expertly crafted, evocative verse, a splendidly defiant girlhood that comes in shirking that fear to embrace base yearning for pleasures like cigarettes, cool clothes, and flavored Chapstick. This collection is a Biblical masterpiece. It captures the loss and longing of survivorship. You, too, will feel the Rapturous pull out, but will want to stay here-just a little longer. ~ Sara Moore Wagner, author of Swan Wife and Hillbilly Madonna Road map and field guide, Avoiding the Rapture documents a coming of age during the devastating effects of deindustrialization. Karen Weyant's poems reveal the hardscrabble existence of prescient girls who "smell water before the rain swells" surrounded by adults that "should have been listening." Among broken beer glass and roadkill, where the night sky is "splattered with rhinestones" and "the town river is thick brown, too dark to see," These are poems of compassion written with an unflinching gaze. A testament to survival, full of sharp edges and wonder, Avoiding the Rapture leaves no one behind. This is a remarkable debut. ~ Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star The Rust Belt has already seen the rapture-several, in fact, and those left behind each time continue to tell new stories. In Karen J. Weyant's Avoiding the Rapture, we meet girls who've "lived among the dead" wearing craft store glitter and vanilla bean Chapstick, who've had to learn survival by listening to the river and looking for answers in the fields, whose indomitable spirits were forged where "god smelled like burned paper." Through stunning imagery and music, Weyant paints with the colors and textures of a post-industrial landscape that reflects more than simple nostalgia. This is poetry for anyone who knows that "when everyone disappears, everything you see will be yours," but only if you claim it. ~ Rochelle Hurt, author of The Rusted City and The J Girls: A Reality Show

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a collection of poems that pulls the reader right into the brutalities, and beauty, of teaching in a struggling charter school. With humor, wit, tears, anger, exhaustion, elation, and a refusal to give up, these poems highlight the struggles of a teacher trying to maintain her dignity and her identity and do right by her students and her own children-while being pulled apart by a system that doesn''t support or defend teachers. More than just an anthem for teachers, however, this collection is a cry for all women who try to give all they can to everything and everyone.These poems are brutal, laying bare the tragic and terrible ways our country is failing us all. But they are also full of moments that are often missing in contemporary education - like humility, compassion, and empathy: "we stand in the hallway as D. tells me / she is pregnant she is due in December She cries and covers her / face with her hands I well up but hide it by biting the inside of my bottom lip." This book should be required reading for career administrators, board of education politicos, and all the legislators who pay little more than lip-service to our nation''s educators. These poems-unique in structure and perspective, and full of beautifully orchestrated lyric turns-are a criticism, and a call for a reckoning, to be sure. ~ Sarah Kain Gutowski, author of Fabulous Beast: Poems In her memoir-in-poems Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Sarah Beddow creates a vital frontline record of American education as it abuts the pandemic. Here, we meet a woman teacher in full, frank embodiment: an educator unwilling to subsume herself entirely to the twinned demands of capitalism and data-driven academic achievement bearing down on her and her students by her charter school employer, yet one who still burns to offer her entire intellectual and energetic self to her under-resourced students. Throughout Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Beddow contrasts the sterile and un-seeing language of corporate education with her own vibrant, devastating personal testimonies and disclosures, granting us an intimate, eviscerating glimpse into the negotiations, struggles, heartbreaks, and joys as lived from her side of the overflowing teacher''s desk.~ Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi Letters These Dispatches unsparingly critique not just the institution, but the complicity of every adult working within it, including Ms. Beddow the teacher, who sometimes yells or slams a door. "I listened to my ideas     come out of his mouth my own mouth / muted / And it''s like      I am not here I am / divorced from my / thoughts I am told again and again to join the / team." An institution with incompetent management can tank the best teachers, run the best future leaders out the door. "But no amount of reflection       will reveal to me how to be / professional in a system          so broken it / shreds me            leaves me a corpse in underwear and an ancient / t-shirt    spread / on the classroom floor." The students will break your heart, but the administrators will crush it. ~ Krystal Languell, author of Systems Thinking with Flowers