FANBOYS: Poems about Teaching and Learning by Lani T. Montreal

In FANBOYS: Poems About Teaching and Learning, poet and educator Lani T. Montreal reviews the kinds of questions that seem angled to discredit the role of poetry and the imagination, and education itself, in a world of violence and hard edges: “…will it be worth it?/ To care so much about a language evolving?” Does grammar and proofreading matter in a world where we will all eventually die?  With each poem in this chapbook, she erects a passionate defense of the value of both language and learning. Here is a poet who gives her entire self always and unstintingly: to the world, to the page, to her students, children, and others she loves. In Lani’s poems, neither poetry nor pedagogy are ever only abstractions: their lessons and gifts are always visceral—they are felt “in the pit of the stomach,” as well as with every touch and feeling. Their lessons seem simple, but are also the most difficult: how to be tender, how “[not to] speak unless properly,” how “[not to] speak unless with praise”— goals that we must strive to achieve even if the polis is not completely free of the tyranny of unjust governments, of cancers, of death.  Shelley spoke of poets as the unsung legislators of the world. Lani T. Montreal, as poet-teacher, extends this view by insisting that when work or love arrives, we cannot say “Wait” or “Time out.” We need to meet it, as these poems do; and not hold anything back.

–Luisa A. Igloria, author of Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize) and The Buddha Wonders if She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal; 2018)

A haunting narrative in verse, FANBOYS aligns the enigma of cancer with the insistence upon answers in the classroom.  Montreal brilliantly weighs the trials of motherhood against the ethics of grammatical hegemony while clocks tick backwards on tardy slips. Motherhood and professorhood intertwine until they are no longer distinct and discernable, save a sestina of homework detention and subject verb agreement. Montreal reminds us, in the way that only poetry can, that while we may live many separate lives, we have only one life to live.

–Rachel Slotnick, Author of In Lieu of Flowers, Tortoise Books,

FANBOYS travels the landscape of language, learning and love.  Montreal has not only written about navigating teaching and creativity, but inserts poems of the body, poems of motherhood, of illness and life that stir the reader and howl survival. Each poem braces itself for the next in a brilliant unfolding of electric narratives which both spin and give footing. Montreal’s voice is one that is heartbreakingly necessary and vastly brave in these times.

–Keli Stewart, Poet , Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Awardee