The Forms of Things Unknown: Teaching Poetry Writing to Teens and Adults [Hardcover]

A college student writes: These words I write/ open their mouths wide/ screaming the most intimate secrets.

An inmate in a maximum-security mens prison writes: Within my writing, I am able to break down my prison walls and escape, leave the gangster fa?ade behind.

The Forms of Things Unknown: Teaching Poetry Writing to Teens and Adults draws from Shelley Savrens forty years of teaching poetry writing to a diverse array of students, from teens with mental health issues to seniors to adults with developmental disabilities, and in a wide variety of settings, which include middle schools, high schools, colleges, juvenile halls, womens centers, and a mens prison.

Each chapter includes an original poem from Savren, heartfelt stories, and lesson plans that introduce poetic concepts through model poems by professionals, open-ended writing assignments, methods for sharing and critiquing, and student poems. Designed for use in a classroom or community setting, this book features forty-one lesson plans and nineteen more poetry-writing workshop ideas and provides guidance and inspiration for teaching poetry writing to teens and adults.

Shelley Savren is the author of two poetry books, The Common Fire (Red Hen Press 2004) and The Wild Shine of Oranges (Tebot Bach Press 2013), and Welcome to Poetryland: Teaching Poetry Writing to Young Children (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). She is an English professor emeritus at Oxnard College and has been teaching poetry writing for the past forty years. Visit her at www.shelleysavren.com.

As a teacher of creative writing at the college and university level for over thirty years, I am always looking for new texts to engage my new generations of students. To find a text appropriate for the wide variety of talents one engages on the undergraduate level is not an easy task. Shelley Savrens The Forms of Things Unknown: Teaching Poetry Writing to Teens and Adults has become the answer to this search. Relying ls)