Steve Almond reads Jade Sylvan's Bad High School Poetry

There was something very vindicating and oddly personally healing about having my horrible, sincerely self-conscious fifteen-year-old poetry read by Steve Almond at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival's celebration of Bad Poetry. I know some version of myself wrote these words at the nadir of adolescent despair alone in her bedroom. They were shameful, secret, self-abusing, and very real. Now I can sit in the Peabody Essex Museum on a Sunday afternoon with 200 people and laugh, not at her, and not exactly with her, but at least beside her.