REVENGE AND FORGIVENESS

The editor of engaging poetry anthologies for young adults, Vecchione has produced an accessible, stimulating, and timely collection. The poems cross time, from Catullus’s “Grief reached across the world to get me” to poet laureate Louise Gluck’s “ . . . I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved.” Most are by contemporary English language poets, mainly lyric and narrative free verse, though entries from the “cannon” (Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare) broaden the tone. Contemporary selections like Stephen Dunn’s “To a Terrorist,” Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Jerusalem,” or Alison Luterman’s “Another Vigil at San Quentin” bring the themes to bear on today’s political situations; while Sandra Cisneros’s “You Called Me Corazón,” Ellen Bass’s “Why People Murder,” or Lucille Clifton’s “Let there be new flowering,” show how we as individuals bring these themes to bear in our own lives. Extensive comments, biographies, and reading lists from each poet round out this first-choice anthology for today’s teens. (Nonfiction. 12 )