Imperfect Tense is a meditation on language by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, professor of language and literacy education in UGA’s College of Education.
Informed by Cahnmann-Taylor’s Fulbright study in Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as her experience teaching English as a second language, this poetry collection is grounded in teaching, learning, and living between languages and cultures.
The poems play, imperfectly, with form, including sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, terza rima, couplets and syllabic verse. Others compress the essence of qualitative interviews and fieldwork observations through free verse and prose poetry. Much like the imported “dragon fruit,” these poems grasp displacement as opportunity while relishing in perpetual “outsider-ness” as a way inside a fundamentally shared human condition.
