How to Love a Country

 In the Author's Note of Richard Blanco's How to Love a Country

[The] public role I was assigned as inaugural poet prompted me to explore more deeply my own civic and artistic duty in questioning and contributing to the American narrative through my poetry and the capacity of the genre itself to foster understanding and offer new perspectives.

This collection is largely the culmination of that deeper exploration. The title, How to Love a Country, is both a statement of hope in our nationhood and an implied question about our struggles with it. My intent was to ground these poems in the complexity and contradictions of my personal, as well as our collective, relationship to our country, given the many sociopolitical issues that remain unresolved: immigration, gender, race, and sexuality, among others. Thematically and emotionally, the poems aspire to have a conversation, not only with myself, not only with other poets and artists, but also with all Americans, from our past and present, through an oracular yet intimate village voice that speaks to matters that continue to concern and affect us en masse: Poetry indebted to our pantheon of visionaries, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem, and Cesar Chávez, as well as our musical folk heroes, such as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Poetry equally inspired by everyday Americans, like my mother, who maintains her faith in our country's promises yet also holds it accountable. Poetry informed by the tradition and spirit of predecessors such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa, Joy Harjo, Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Martín Espada, as well as the current chorus of socially conscious poetry that actively responds to the most pressing concerns of our day.