The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America

In this earnest and soulful debut memoir, poet Sonia-Wallace writes of busking poetry across America. In 2012, he set up a typewriter on a table at a Los Angeles street fair, offering to write poems on demand. It was mostly a joke for the out-of-work actor—until a tough young Chicana woman asks for a poem about her long-absent father, then nearly breaks down upon reading his verse. In pursuing his craft, Sonia-Wallace wins an all-expenses paid writing residency on Amtrak, which he uses to attend a one-week poetry residency given by the Mall of America to write verse for shoppers. “In the end, 20 percent of all the people I wrote for in the mall wound up in tears,” he writes. Then he meets Eowyn, a witch, at Michigan’s Electric Forest Music Festival. He later visits her in Salem, Mass., during which time he gains insight into his own queer identity and realizes he’s indulged in opting in and out of identifying as queer. He then “marks” himself as queer for the first time by painting his nails in an act of “radical adornment.” By the end, poetry evolves far beyond a whim for Sonia-Wallace; as a teacher to other queer poets he now values his role in strangers’ lives—“We are starving for someone to listen.” Readers will be heartened and inspired by Sonia-Wallace’s artistic and spiritual coming-of-age. [em](June) [/em]