To be officially released this month is Thomas Fink's Reading Poetry with College and University Students (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). More information at the publisher's BOOK LINK. I am grateful for joining a new category of "FINALLY: I'M IN A BOOK WITH JOHN "No man is an island" DONNE!" Tom Fink, the author, is one of our most trustworthy poetry critics today and I would recommend any of his insights. This book is meant for teachers but I'd think it'd be of interest to poetry lovers, specifically those who give meaningful and deep attention to the art..
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Reading Poetry with College and University Students aims to help faculty foster students' intellectual and aesthetic engagement with poems while enabling them to sharpen critical and creative thinking skills. Reading authors across history and the globe--such as Julia Alvarez, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mahmoud Darwish, John Donne, Paolo Javier, Yusef Komunyakaa, Audre Lorde, and Wislawa Szymborska--Thomas Fink zeroes in on how learners can surmount and even enjoy tackling the most difficult aspects of poetry.
By exploring students' emotional identification with speakers and characters of poems as well as poets themselves, Fink shows how an instructor can motivate students to produce effective and empathic interpretations. Through divergent readings of selected poems, the book addresses the influence of various theoretical paradigms, ranging from ecological, psychological, feminist, and queer theory to deconstructive, postcolonial, and surface reading orientations. Instructors receive practical guidance through these poems, poets, and modes of reading, helping to give learners raw material to reach their own nuanced interpretations and strengthen their emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual acumen.
