Negative Positive
Title: Poetry does not exist to make you comfortable
Review: I feel compelled to respond to the person who found the opening poem "racist" because the speaker says "another child has killed a child / and i catch myself relieved that they are / white."First of all, the fact that a poem depicts a certain attitude or feeling does not mean that the poet endorses that attitude or feeling. In this case, the sentiment is honest even if it is not morally admirable. Poetry does not always depict life or human nature as we would like them to be, but rather as they are.Second, the last line of the poem says "these too are your children this too is your child." So the poem has corrected the speaker's own withdrawal from the scene. It ends, I think, with a rejection of racism...but it could be a good poem even if it did not.
Is the review positive or negative? 