Lesléa Newman is best known as the author of the classic children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies. Newman is also an award-winning poet, however, and this book draws on her poetic skill to give us a cycle of 68 poems that serve as reflections on the death of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student killed in a brutal gay-bashing in October 1998.
Newman was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the university’s Gay Awareness Week just a few days after the tragedy. Despite being shaken by the event, Newman gave her talk, she writes in the afterward to her book, recognizing the Wyoming community’s need not for her exact words, but for her presence as an out, proud lesbian to show them such a life was possible.
Later, she reflected on the many people who had told her “I can’t imagine,” in response to the murder. Her poems, which she calls “a historical novel in verse,” are her attempt to imagine—not only because that is her job as a poet, she writes, but also because it is her job as a human. She explains, “Only if each of us imagines that what happened to Matthew Shepard could happen to any one of us will we be motivated to do something. And something must be done.”
The poems speak from a variety of imagined perspectives, including Matthew, his assailants, his parents, the mountain biker who first found him, the police officer who came next, the doctor who treated him, and the housekeeper at the hospital—but also the stars above, the deer found curled next to him, and the fence he was tied to, as well as less specific mothers, fathers, students, gay people, and others who heard of the killing.
The poems are varied in structure and form. Many lines are brief and haiku-like in their simplicity (a few are in actual haiku form), giving them a rawness and impact that might well be lost among more words. The somber and more complex subject matter makes this book best for older audiences than Heather; the publisher says age 14 and up, though I think there is little here that would be inappropriate for most middle-schoolers, who likely already have a sense of homophobia and other injustices—that’s why I’m making a rare exception and including a YA-ish book in this database, which usually only covers through middle grade.
Newman’s slim but powerful volume reminds us why, even so many years after Shepard’s death, his story still resonates.
