VOICES OF JUSTICE

Portraits and poems celebrate change-makers.

Lyon mixes such stalwarts as Nelson Mandela, Dolores Huerta, Jeannette Rankin, and Shirley Chisholm with emerging heroes such as the Parkland shooting survivors and Greta Thunberg and less well-known people like Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese government official stationed in Lithuania who wrote transit visas for 6,000 Jews during World War II, and Brazilian transgender activist and pastor Alexya Salvador. The unrhymed poems vary in structure, frequently relying on line breaks and spaces within lines to govern reading pace while occasionally indulging in flashier visuals. The Jane Addams poem appropriately resembles a small home with an open door, successfully evoking Hull House, but the poem that celebrates primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas is too clever for its own good, lines arranged like the rays around a large, yellow sun and consequently very difficult to read. The language itself is often disappointingly flat, as in these first lines of the Julia Butterfly Hill poem: “Do you like to climb trees? / Would you live in one / for two years to save its life?” With the exception of a compelling James Baldwin, the portraits are too often likewise static. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 57.3% of actual size.)

Well-intended but undistinguished.