What is a poem, really?

Could it be the houseplant longing for its moment outside? The shine of a basketball court? The story of your name? What would happen if you wrote the way you thought? If you could see the world through someone else’s eyes? This year, The Telling Room challenged the tenth graders at York High School to reimagine what a poem could be. The poets in this book rose to the occasion. Within, you’ll fi nd poems that imagine new futures and poems that bring us into childhood memories of diving into lakes and sitting by fi res. Poems about the limits of writing and poems about the power of sports. This resulting collection is a privileged window into the minds of young writers and the myriad undiscovered ways in which a poem can live on the page.