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Notes From
the Editors
Crossing Race and
Nationality: The Racial Formation of Asian Americans, 1852-1965
by Bob Wing
The Glory and the Gutting: Steeler Nation
and the Humiliation of Pittsburgh
by Charles
McCollester
Labor, the State, and the Struggle for a
Democratic Zimbabwe
by Patrick Bond and
Richard Saunders
Denise Bergman is author of Seeing Annie Sullivan
(Cedar Hill Books, 2005), poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s
teacher, and the editor of an anthology of urban poetry, City River
Voices (West End Press, 1992).
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Let not those who deny thee to us,
make of thee a graven image and invite us
to bow down to it
writes Saum Song Bo.
He says, graven, an idol beyond us
stone or steel, unalive
he says deny,
foot barely on shore, spun around, go home
How to escape
exclusion, keep one step ahead of the tiger’s teeth
snapping at your heels?
He says those,
their Central Pacific dreams of gold rumbling along
on a bed of a thousand Chinese lives
the traincar rhythm
not/your/tired/your/poor, your/tired
your/poor, not/the/tempest/tossed, the/tempest/tossed
not the
yearning/yearning/yearning to breathe free
a chant hammered into gospel, sung out loud, written in ink
sealed into law, so
easy, it’s always been.
(Saum Song Bo aspired
to be a U.S. citizen. From a letter, 1885.)
Disassembled Wonder
by Denise Bergman
(The Statue of
Liberty arrived in New York in 1888 in 214 wooden crates)
Disassembled wonder:
crates and a box of jangling bolts,
instructions: how to build a liberty
Longshore cousins of a
Polish leatherworker, Irish farmer,
olive presser from Spain queued since daybreak
(thermos of coffee and blood sausage on crusty day-old)
hoist the swinging puzzle blocks ship to dock
Thank you France for
your daughter’s sandaled toes,
trim dressed torso, legs, torch-flexed arm, and mouth
mouth of the mother of
the sculptor who dreams colossus
We wait to hear
give me your tired your poor,
yearning to breathe free
but she is babe in the
woods, not fully assembled
a bolted welded steel and copper, innocent iron
sheet over scaffold
and air
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