Imperfect Tense

by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Imperfect Tense is a meditation on language. The first section is a specific meditation on Americans' pursuit of Spanish as a second language. The second section revolves around experiences as an English language and poetry teacher working with immigrant communities, and the final section is a meditation on the languages of family.

Genres: Poetry, Language

123 pages, Paperback

Published July 16, 2016

About the author

MELISA "Misha" CAHNMANN-TAYLOR is the author of Imperfect Tense and and co-author of four books, Enlivening Instruction with drama and Improv Teachers Act Up: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre and two editions of Arts-Based Research in Education). Misha’s poems, essays, research articles, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals in print and online including TESOL Quarterly, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Anthropology & Humanism, Poet Lore, Mom Egg, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Calyx Magazine, American Poetry Review, and in many other scholarly and literary homes.

Some of Misha’s awards include the Beckman award for “Professors Who Inspire Social Change,” Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg and Anna Davidson poetry prizes, Jenny Penny Oliver Diversity Award, First Year Odyssey Teaching Award, and the Foreign Language Association of Georgia [FLAG] Leadership Award.

In 2020 Misha was appointed as U.S. Fulbright Ambassador scholar to speak to faculty audiences around the U.S. about Fulbright. A Fulbright Scholarship recipient (Oaxaca Mexico, 2013-2014) and visiting scholar-artist in Guanajuato Mexico at the Resplandor Center (2017), she enjoys speaking internationally in Mexico, Israel, Canada, Chile, Poland, Germany, Hong Kong, Aruba, Spain, and elsewhere around the world. Cahnmann-Taylor has directed a U.S. Department of Education Transition to Teaching grant and numerous National Endowment for the Arts Big Read and Georgia Humanities grants.

A graduate of the New England College low-residency MFA program and the University of Pennsylvania’s Educational Linguistics doctoral program, she lives in Athens, Georgia with her husband, two children and their rescue dog, Bagel.

Reviews

[Ellen]

Imperfect Tense is a volume of poetry by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor. The first two sections are primarily concerned with language: language acquisition (Spanish as a second language and other language learners) and poems apparently based on Cahnmann-Taylor's experience as a teacher of language. I found these poems very interesting, especially the prose poems. I read them more, however, for their content than their form.

The third section is focused on family connections and addiction, primarily the narrator's relationship with her dysfunctional mother. I found the poems in this section uneven in quality. Fetal Pig Dissection was especially interesting from a technical point of view.

Overall, the poetry was of inconsistent quality but there were many strong poems. I am glad to have read this work and want to thank LibraryThing for the opportunity to do so in exchange for an honest review.

[Emily Katz]

There's much to love about this collection. One poem I keep coming back to is “Woman Shows Me Where We are in the Service." It's a poem, I think, that reflects the best qualities of Cahnmann-Taylor's work. Many readers will get the setting--the audience of a Bar Mitzvah service— immediately; it's a setting that looms large in communal American Jewish experience and in American pop culture (think of the infamous pot-drenched take on this rite-of-passage the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, for example). In this poem, we see the narrator assessing herself and her place in this place: She knows the prayers, she knows where this tribe, her tribe, lays its borders ("I had my finger/pressed on the right page in the book, I knew/when to sit and when to stand and with whom”). But the poem hinges on a small misstep, enough of a faux pas to remind the speaker how easy it is to fall outside the circle of community, at least in her own perception. Her mistake: to eat a candy that was passed to her so that she might throw it toward the bar mitzvah boy in celebration of his achievement, a common custom. The poem opens with this act of consumption—“I ate the candy,” the narrator confesses—and this earthy, desiring “I” powers the poem, and many of my favorite poems in the collection. The language here and elsewhere in the collection is immediate, funny, pungent. And the speaker is so familiar to this reader: the good Jewish girl who wants too much and always wants it, somehow, at the wrong time.

[Elissa]

Thank you, Melisa Cahnman-Taylor, for this wonderful book of poems!

[Kristy]

I am horrible at articulating why I like some poems and don't really respond to others, but I really enjoyed this collection of poetry by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor. As you may guess from the title, the author is concerned with exploring language -- learning it (especially English-speaking Americans learning Spanish), teaching it, and using it to explore the interplay between being a mother and being a daughter. Cahnmann-Taylor has an inventive sense of form, which plays well with with the content of her poems. This was a strong and compelling collection, and one I'd recommend to any poetry-enjoyer or Spanish-language learner.

[Sally Kilpatrick]

Naturally, I had to buy this collection of poetry for the title alone. I especially enjoyed the poems on language and those on motherhood. Lots of deft turn of phrase and food for thought here.

[Ashley Booth]

I received an early reviewer copy from LibraryThing--which means I went in with no expectations.

I tried with this book. And I do think there is a genuine impulse here, but unfortunately it just fell a flat. The grappling with language was real, but there was no urgency that I really felt behind virtually all these poems.

The last part of the book was definitely the best, but alas--these were not only not memorable but never really affected me.

I'd be very interested to see work from this author in 5-10 years and see how things have matured.