Jennifer McCormick opens a fascinating window on the lives of young women, showing how poetry can create a sense of security and self-esteem in the often sterile, violent, and oppressive environment of an urban high school. The students' poetry is at once disturbing and beautiful, hopeful and bleak, and McCormick's depiction of the increasingly institutionalized nature of urban schools is riveting. The author crafts a compelling argument that shows the power of poetry as a response to the depersonalization that students face in many urban high schools, and shows readers how it flourishes both despite and because of the violence and 'criminalizing institutional routines' of many state schools.