1. The family can’t afford to (or chooses not to) heat the house during the night; apparently their heat comes from a wood or coal stove. This doesn’t necessarily suggest poverty, maybe only frugality.

2. Because the speaker fears the “chronic angers” (line 9) of the house, they must come from the family’s interpersonal relationships. They could suggest petty quarreling or traumatic abuse. Readers don’t know if the child is the only one in the home who feels/fears those angers.

Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons" presents a second-generation Asian American's quiet analysis of his own experience between two cultures. The speaker returns with gentle persistence throughout to two words, "persimmon" and "precision," and by poem's end, these two words resonate with representative significance for a son who has managed to recover specific values from his fading heritage.

Because of Blood: Natasha Tretheway's Historical Memory -- Interview by Lisa DeVries

Charles Bernstein is mostly widely known for his early influence in Language poetry. A loose constellation of experimental writers in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto, Language poetry emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and promoted new forms of experimental writing that paid attention to language itself. Much as, in the art world, movements such as Abstract Expressionism called attention to the materiality of their artistic medium, Language poetry engaged a similar task for writing.

Acclaimed for its dense, expansive form and linguistic energy, Albert Goldbarth’s poetry covers everything from historical and scientific concerns to private and ordinary matters. His numerous, highly-regarded collections are often filled with long poems which range in style from playful and conversational to serious and philosophical. Goldbarth’s unique style is a mix of complex ideas and detailed descriptions woven together with verbal play and often juxtaposed with dissimilar objects and facts.

This poem follows directly after Child on the Marsh.  Just the page prior, Lanier was a child caught in the sucking embrace of his mother and the earth.  Now he is caught in the suck of the earth as wilderness battlefield.  The comfort of his mother's breast is replaced by the encouragement of his brother, Clifford, to steal the fresh blue shirt off the dead body of a Union soldier.

Hudgins begins:

          He was an Indiana corporal

The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle of the American Civil War, and the principal engagement of the Chancellorsville Campaign. It was fought from April 30 to May 6, 1863, inSpotsylvania County, Virginia, near the village of Chancellorsville.

Letters to a Stranger, by Thomas James (Graywolf Press, 2008; originally published by Houghton Mifflin, 1973)

Gwendolyn Bennett Crosscup of Kutztown, Pa., a figure in the Harlem Renaissance Movement in the 1920s, died in the Reading, Pa. Hospital on May 30.

She would have been 79 in August.

Her poetry has been published in anthologies and has been translated into Spanish and other languages.

In 1979, a doctoral dissertation on her life and career as a poet, painter, art teacher, and Harlem educator, was accepted at a university in Atlanta.