Portside

This new selection should help broaden reader interest in the work of this socially conscious poet.

Here is an extraordinary anthology by contemporary working class poets.

Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land, Peter Neil Carroll's new collection, takes us on a fascinating odyssey across an increasingly broken America. With a cast of characters as disparate as Billy the Kid, closet racists, grave robbers, ghosts along the Natchez Trace, blue collar workers and the short-sighted corporations that exploit them, these poems share an undercurrent of looming disaster, a deep knowing that things are about to turn bad. (Cultural Weekly)

The new Poet Laureate of the United States, Juan Felipe Herrera, was the child of migrant workers. His poetry sparkles with a luminous, richly inventive language and a technical prowess that draws from both traditional and innovative poetics. He is the first Latino to become the country's Poet Laureate, and is the most recent Poet Laureate of California. Here is a review of his New and Selected Poems (2008), and some useful links.