It gives us great pleasure to present the Live and Let DEI anthology. We invite you to download and share the PDF freely. Enormous thanks to our contributors, Annie Mydla and her administrative staff in Poland, and Laura Duffy for the handsome book design.
Editor Jendi Reiter reports, "We received over 650 submissions for this anthology, from which I selected the 34 poems and text-image hybrids you are about to read. Some are comical, others are poignant, tragic, or righteously angry. They share a commitment to keep our language and our country from becoming corrupted.
"I was looking for poems that used the banned words in a transformative way. A lot of these words are abstractions, which can make a poem feel generic and unmusical if one simply stacks the words together without surrounding imagery or poetic rhythm.
"Many entrants picked up on my suggestion to use them as end-words for a sestina. Lucille Shulklapper’s “The Inequity of Justice” stood out from this batch because it wove the banned words into a montage of emotionally wrenching images from the news, while Angela Maniscalco’s “Braving Barriers” used these words to create a complex inner monologue of a woman’s self-silencing in a trauma support group. Aidah Gil’s “A Sestina on DEI (Deceit, Exploitation, and Indifference)” dramatized how workplaces misuse diversity lingo to pretend they treat their Black employees well. Frank Bradstow decided to write a ghazal, another word-repeating form, with clever internal rhymes that allow tonal shifts from mockery to yearning for social change.
"I also enjoyed playful poems that brought out the words’ other meanings, like Judy Clarence’s “So You Want to Be a Cat Show Judge?” Though it starts off fluffy in the best way, it ends with a gentle but pointed allusion to white supremacy. “Diversity of Sound” by Jennie Meres recounts how indifference to the male/female binary of electrical plugs led to an explosive childhood experiment.
"A great parody will always get our attention at WW. Angela Sweet-Christian’s “Baby Got Sacked” employs the catchy structure of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s rap hit to satirize the know-nothings’ destruction of academic research. R.C. Hoerter imagines an alt-right love sonnet titled “My Tradwife’s Lies Are Nothing Like JD’s”. Zazie Productions channels the Beat poets in “Howl for the Banned Words” while Chris Krechowiecki-Shaw’s “We Did Diversity Hires” updates Billy Joel’s Boomer history lesson.
"John Beck, Jonathan Creamer, Erin Bondo, and Kenton Robinson each had original visual approaches to erasure poetry. Paul Fericano’s hybrid poem-illustration represents Trump as the ultimate text blackout.
"All this and much more awaits you in these pages. Enjoy and be inspired to create subversive word-collages of your own!"
