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What reviewers of Special Education have to say…
“If I imagine Mar’s book as a classroom, each poem a lesson, it’s incredible for the teacher-poet to begin by laying bare their shame. In traditional pedagogy, teachers are instructed to hold tight to their authority and limit the number of concessionary mistakes. But in Mar’s Special Education, harm is acknowledged and repented for.”
— francxs gufan nan for Muzzle Magazine
“…[H]er poems code-switch and cross-pollinate urban sociology, classical lyricism, and world-wise smack with a deft, inquisitive approach to each. . . .
Special Education is a collection of poem-tales and autobiographic truths delivered by a writer who has heard every expert opinion on her profession and identity and determined for herself, shrewdly and with practitioner’s clout, which ones hold merit. Her great power is how she convinces us of the same.”
— Arden Levine for Green Linden Review
“Mar’s poetry fights the erasure of her family, herself, and her profession from the public language surrounding teaching.”
— May-lee Chai for Eastwind Ezine
“As if the glass-shattering earthquake the poet imagines in today’s high-rise San Francisco had entered her language, I found myself profoundly shaken by these powerful poems—by their truthfulness to the experience of our fractured and fractious world of warring identities that want to enlist us against ourselves. And, as she intimately shares the ordeal of trying to teach kids whom ‘the world will try/to drown,’ her poems utterly transform the meaning of ‘special education.’”
— Eleanor Wilner, Author of Before Our Eyes: New & Selected Poems
“What I admire so much in this book is the writing itself—these are often long poems and they engage us from poems’ entries to endings. Mar knows how to rope her readers in and keep them on the page. Direct—‘I dread your arrival, even/as I am tasked with your safety.’ Vulnerable—‘It was the place that made me. …I am precisely what I was made to be.’ Her language is spot-on, her imagery fresh and provocative. Mixed race teacher, student, wife, daughter, granddaughter, citizen. The poems of Special Education are not only in conversation with each other, but they also reveal an observant self speaking to herself, and educating herself as well as the reader who is generously invited into the world of this marvelously clear, dynamically layered collection.”
— Martha Rhodes, Author of The Thin Wall