PAULA FINN
The poetry of my guest, Gregory Pardlo, is some of the finest, engaged work written in the U.S. today. He brings us the striking air traffic controller, permanently replaced, selling off everything but his house, his young son outside that house speaking to snowflakes. He conjures up the glory and the grace of girls jumping Double Dutch. And he tells of an impoverished old man who asks to hold the hand of a recovering alcoholic so that together they might toss a coin into a fountain and wish for something else. And Pardlo’s work helps us imagine what that something else might be.
This episode brings poetry to the crucial task of reinventing solidarity. New Labor Forum Editor Paula Finn hosts a conversation with award winning poet Javier Zamora, who at nine years old left his home in El Salvador and made his way, as an unaccompanied minor, through Guatemala and Mexico and across the Sonoran Desert to reunite with his parents in California. In this interview, Zamora reflects on this experience and on the role of poetry in movements for social justice, and reads poems from his book Unaccompanied.