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1st Teacher’s Voice
chapbook Contest winner
SmackDown!
Poems about
the professor business
Anna E. Moss
"Sardonic, hilarious and at times magnificent, the poems in Anna E. Moss’ Smackdown! draw us into a frenetic fictional universe as she captures the murderously picayune world of academia -- high stakes and sometimes low folks duke it out in poems that position us in between a dean ‘caressing his wild eyebrow hair’ as his ‘wife's pink Cadillac swings into the smooth macadam drive’ and a nontenured Assistant Professor who is sitting in as Department Chair (while the real chair goes on sabbatical), ‘Late that night I woke/from a troubled sleep/I couldn't let him ambush me/Next morning. I surprised him/at his mahogany desk.’ Obsessive and petty, they duke it out for no less than how the past will be remembered and the future imagined, that is, who will teach and what will be taught. These are not poems about pitiful or quirky students, the poor or disenfranchised. Anna E. Moss’ devastated eye dares to look at power, money, and privilege. These are intrepid poems that strip the mahogany veneer off power and allow us an inside look. We thank her for these poems."
Sapphire
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