What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series, Readers Write Back, we asked our readers which poem, of all those we’ve published in our last seven years, has moved them most. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Sad Rollercoaster
My daughter is in the kitchen, working out death.
She wants to get it: how it tastes and feels.
Her teacher talks like it's some glittery gold sticker.
Her classmates hear rumors, launch it as a curse
when toys aren't shared. Between bites of cantaloupe,
she considers what she knows: her friend's grandpa lives only
in her iPad. Dr. Seuss passed, but keeps speaking
in rhyme. We go to Queens Zoo and spot the beakish skull
of a white-tailed deer tucked between rocks
in the puma's enclosure. It's just for show, I explain,
explaining nothing. That night and the one after,
my daughter dreams of bones—how they lift
out of her skin and try on dresses. So silly! she laughs,
when I ask if she's okay. Then toward the back-end
of summer, we head to Coney Island to catch
a Cyclones game. We buy popcorn and fries. A pop fly arcs
over checkerboard grass when past the warning track,
the park wall, she sees a giant wooden spine,
this brownish-red maze traced in decay. She calls it
Sad Rollercoaster, then begs to be taken home.
from the book LET OUR BODIES CHANGE THE SUBJECT / University of Nebraska Press
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Color cover image of Jared Harel's book, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject
What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back

"One Poetry Daily that struck a resonant chord was May 31, 2024’s Sad Rollercoaster by Jared Harél. The poem chronicles the summer in which his daughter came to understand Death. In second grade, I wrote a dirge contemplating the black void of nothingness. This prompted a meeting with my teacher, parents, and principal. I explained the poem as an attempt to wrap my head around the notion of Death, rather than as a call for help. The second-grade mind is hard to decipher, and the bleak existential tone didn’t help. Now, as both a parent and an educator, I appreciate the additional check into authorial intent. Teaching high school kids sometimes elicits flights of fancy that raise eyebrows and might be a similar cause for concern. Yet the poet in me understands the need to explore thought into poetry with no regrets too. Harél’s poem awakened these vivid memories and relevant thoughts."

Gary Glauber
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Color head-and-shoulders shot of Kwames Dawes speaking
Kwame Dawes: Jamaica's New Poet Laureate

"I’ve always felt that Jamaica is a place in which poets are valued, or at least poetry is valued. People talk in poetic ways in Jamaica. So one of my greatest tasks–I have a twofold sort of things. One is very much about establishing a kind of infrastructure for archiving, for finding a way to keep in the public eye the work that Jamaican poets have done over the centuries, and at the same time to help Jamaicans to recognize their own poetic instincts and the way that poetry permeates the whole society."

via RHODE ISLAND PBS
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