• In their article, Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor say that an ethnographic poet and the poetic ethnographer must write into “what one does not know yet” and to “what one already knows.” How does Thomas’ poem do this? What does he know about Sámi reindeer herding? What does he not know about reindeer herding and about the Sámi?
• How does bringing together poetry and ethnography blur dichotomies between science and art, inward-focused writing versus engaging outward, and aesthetics and observation?
• What poetic tool does Vasser-Elong use in his poem to create a feeling of entrapment in the first three stanzas? Notice how the sound of the poem matches that feeling. How does he use the same tool in the last stanza to create a sense of movement out of the poem toward freedom? What other kinds of meaning does the poet evoke with the symbol of the labyrinth?
• How does Wright make the lynching memorial feel both personal and political? How does the poet counter, with the fact of the poem itself, what the speaker’s Grandma says, “the past don’t never forget though we might”?
• What are the many meanings and contradictions Wright is speaking to in the following lines?:

“a fullness in its empty, an empty in its full,
a place made to be left, a space made to leave a hope upon,
an altar”