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      October 13, 2020A 10th Grade Reading List for Times Like TheseLaura Murray

      Beloved
      do you have memories like mine, of stickered paperbacks and pencil-smudged desks—
      The Lord of
      the flies’ lazy laps overhead, the dry erase fumes and overcooked body spray? Outside, the
      The House on Mango
      street noise, like mortgages or old age, is far away from essays and lunch trays and football
      The Hunger
      games and dress codes. Now listen up: Allegory. Foreshadowing. Irony. Theme. In a quality
      The Handmaid’s
      tale, everything has a symbol. (Are you taking notes?) A fireman, a cake, a pilgrim, a paperweight,
      To Kill
      a mockingbird, any bird. Glasses, skulls, heads on sticks, #42. Today nothing adds up. What would
      The Hate
      u give for the answer—easy to spot, like red hunting hats or scarlet letters or blue eyes? Vocab quiz:
      Slaughterhouse-
      five ways to describe a dock light: emerald, jade, viridian, lime, chartreuse. Why would you need these
      Into the wild stories? Pages dripped with blood, trauma, conspiracy, breakdowns, talking animals. But
      The Things
      they carried truths, along with imperfections, histories, warnings. So when you’re getting torn
      Things Fall
      apart (hang the witch/burn the pages/send them back/lock them up/distrust the
      Love
      medicine/white noise & white houses/red hats & red plagues), remember the night still
      I Know Why the Caged Bird
      sings with voices. Changing the ending. Do you have memories like mine, of an eager, limitless
      Brave New
      world, of it stretching before you? I’m taking a breath.         I’m ready to
      Speak  
         

      from Poets Respond

      Laura Murray

      “I had fun writing this poem. Increasingly it has felt to me like we’re living in some sort of fictionalized reality, aligning with material you might read in high school English. Although I wrote this after the vice presidential debate (and Kamala Harris’s meme-able ‘I’m speaking’ moment), the final title was an unintentional but happy tie-in. I also thought it was fitting that most if not all of these titles are banned or challenged books.”

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