Best Poetry Performance

Photo: Gina Binkley

Toward the end of the boisterous, colorful Nick Cave Feat. Nashville performance, poet Ciona Rouse took to the Schermerhorn stage alone and delivered a bone-shaking performance. Rouse held a deck of colorful index cards, which she flipped away onto the floor as she recited a poem, each line beginning with the same word: “we.” The “we” are homeless people, children, housewives, abusers, accusers, the dead, the living, the old. The “we” are lovers and fighters and resistors. Touching briefly on a slew of contemporary issues, Rouse didn’t sermonize from a hilltop. She invited us into her righteous valley. We keep hearing that America has become monumentally divided, but Rouse showed us we have quite a lot in common after all. ERICA CICCARONE

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