The case against the Colombian free trade pact

Courageous activists and leaders have struggled, suffered and remained steadfast in a country where grassroots organizers have been systematically and brutally eliminated for years. If they can continue to speak out, we should too. If they can remain vocally united in their opposition to the FTA, Americans should educate themselves and unite in opposition as well. The United States-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement should be stopped in its tracks now, before it's too late.

- Baltimore poet and activist Kim Jensen, author of last week's Poem of the Week, on the reality of life in Colombia and the importance of opposing the Colombia Free Trade Act, in the Baltimore Sun. Read the whole piece here.

Poem of the Week: Kim Jensen

And Even George W. is out of a Job

You know the economy's bad

when people are lined up around the block

to apply for the job

of the wicked witch.

They've been lined up all night

waiting for their chance to prove

it's nothing at all

to climb a broom

and cackle like a wall-street speculator

just before the crash

to whisk....into the starry suburban night

and fly fly fly...

.....................and all without benefits

.....................of body armor.

I saw them -- huddled masses

waiting for the chance to make

an impression

............on their one circut

........................on autopilot around the moonlit sky.

Even I took a stab

and found it's not so hard

to zoom out above the cul-de-sac of cape cods --

............a surprisingly predictable circle.

But just when I was ready to take the job

I had a vision

of some wind-blown

foreclosed home swirling in from Kansas

.......tumbling from the sky and landing forever on my face.

No.

It wasn't worth the price.

-Kim Jensen

Used by permission.

Kim Jensen's first novel about a turbulent love affair between a Palestinian exile and an American student, The Woman I Left Behind, was published in 2006 by Curbstone Press, and was a finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year. Her first book of poems, Bread Alone, was published in 2009, and her new collection of poems, The Only Thing that Matters is forthcoming from Syracuse University Press. Kim currently lives in Maryland where she serves on the editorial board of the Baltimore Review and teaches English at the Community College of Baltimore County.

Jensen was on the panel Women & War/Women & Peace: International Voices at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Baltimore City Paper Review of Bread Alone

The following is an excerpt of Brett McCabe of the Baltimore City Paper's review of Kim Jensen's latest Bread Alone. Kim will be part of a panel on women and war at the Split This Rock poetry festival in March. The full text of the review can be found here. You can hear Kim read from the book this Saturday, Dec. 5 at the Enoch Pratt Library @ 2 pm.

Roland Park Branch
5108 Roland Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21210
410-396-6099


The result of this wide-angle focus is a bunker mentality of survival, an attitude of hard-earned daily victories over the malignant forces that feel to have infected many parts of daily life. It's an approach that opens Jensen's poetry up to her subtle shifts and poignant intimations. "The Feast of Sacrifice" begins with the image of Hussein's body swinging from a noose, but concludes in the passive public collusion in the spectacle of heinous acts, where "from the number of hits and visits/ --that people are eager to hear/about all sorts/of disasters." "I still believe/ in the power of words" starts "Rock Bottom," the sort of familiar opening salvo in a screed that might envision poetry's power to change the world, but Jensen twists that expectation by suggesting that it's not her words that are wielding the power: "Isn't it punishment enough/ to endure/ this wreckage of a human/ story?"