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Final Exam: Poems About Teachers and Their Students
$28.00
by J. Barry Koops
Paperback: 201 pages
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
It started with a poem torn out of The New Yorker, says J. Barry Koops of this collection of poems. He notes that it was the voice of the poem that snagged his attention. In the 85 poems that Koops eventually chose he recognized the voices of real people: the math teacher across the hall; a colleague whose passing he mourns; a professor whose fingerprints are all over his life; a classmate remembered over decades; a joke or a jest like an arrow. Koops predicts that in the four sections of this anthology you will hear something like threads of conversations, voices responding to one another; objecting, refuting, reflecting. Through the words of luminaries we already know, like Billy Collins, Louise Erdrich, Seamus Heaney, Mary Karr, and Jane Kenyon, to outsider poets we'll want to know better, Final Exam lifts a glass to memorable teachers and mentors and toasts the schools we remember with nostalgia and regret. Koops offers this book as a tribute to teachers and professors who chose a life of significance, a life that made a difference--the teaching life.
Brooks Street Books is an independent publisher based in Laguna Beach, California
offering art and gift books with a regional focus. We are inspired by the natural beauty of our community, and by the creativity of the many artists and writers who live and work here. As we expand our offerings and broaden the scope of the works that we publish, we remain committed to the idea that places have power, and there’s poetry to be found even in the daily details of life. To paraphrase Rumi, Beauty surrounds us; but we usually need to be walking in a garden (or on a beach!) to know it.
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