In October of 1998 Matthew Shepard, a young, gay, college student was beaten nearly to death and left hanging on a fence in Wyoming for 18 hours before he was discovered. The killers admitted they did it because he was gay (one later boasted in prison "I'm the one that killed that fag"). Shepard died five days after being found without regaining consciousness. Leslea Newman, award winning author of books like Heather Has Two Mommies, was the scheduled speaker for the opening of the University of Wyoming's Gay Awareness Week on the night before Matthew died. She arrived to a campus and community in shock. Ten years later she began writing this anthology of poems related to Matthew Shepard's death. The collection includes a variety of poetic styles from all different points of view of animate and inanimate objects including the fence he was hung on, the doe that lay nearby as if to comfort him when the police arrived, the perpetrators, the lawyers and judge at the trial, a doctor, parents, and others. This is a poignant book, full of emotion as it should be. Two that affected me most were on facing pages. One was told from the point of view of a tree that is happy to be cut down to be made into something special, never dreaming that it would be a box to hold the ashes of a boy. The other, titled "Class Photo: Me in the Middle OR 'What Will You Be When You Grow Up?'" is an alphabetical list of possible occupations that children might say with the one in the center of the list being "martyr." Following the poems is a brief account of Newman's experience in Wyoming when she gave her speech and notes on the poems and the quotations that accompany many of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment