“I became symbolic mother, teacher, lover, friend, and mentor to these new creative writing members” (147). This is a memoir of a therapist's refractory bereavement, obsessional search for meaning, excessive ambition, and intense projection. The institutional context is a “poetry intervention” within a residential-treatment program for teenagers in custody of a state's Department of Children and Families.
Poetry here begins as a group effort with a hierarchical division of labor. Step one: Sharon Charde uses simple prompts—for example, “If I could, I would . . . ” (35–38)—to elicit raw catharsis by participants. Step two: She praises participants for their eloquence and power. Step three: She stitches their utterances into a collective poem. Some of “the girls” have a way with words, individually compose poems, and perform public readings of their poetry for bien-pensant audiences at élite cultural institutions.
Charde does not have participants come to grips with canonical poetry—say,...