Quote of the Day by Renee Nicole Good: 'Life is merely...' - Braveheart's poem tells profound truth about human birth, death. Here's how

Renee Nicole Good was an acclaimed poet who wanted to experiment with a new form of expression. "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs", a poem by Renée Nicole Macklin Good contains profound truth about life, birth and death. Renee Nicole Good consistently sought to write beyond her own experience, Kent Wascom, director of the creative writing Master of Fine Arts program at Old Dominion University in Virginia, revealed. She wrote about elderly people, veterans and people from different places in other times as she tries to illuminate the lives of others, he said.

Renée Nicole Macklin Good's poem "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs" states - "that the bible and qur'an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths 'make room for wonder' -- all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as: life is merely/to ovum and sperm/and where those two meet/and how often and how well/and what dies there."

In 2020, Good also won one of Old Dominion's most prestigious accolades, the American Academy of American Poets Prize. The award program is administered by the Academy of American Poets, but every participating university or college conducts its own competition.


37-year-old Good was killed by an immigration agent on Wednesday in Minneapolis. Federal officials, including President Donald Trump, have defended the shooting as lawful, saying that the agent who fired had acted in self-defense. City and state officials called those accounts "propaganda" and "garbage."

Rajiv Mohabir, a poetry professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said he selected her poem when he served as a guest judge for Old Dominion. He remembered the poem, "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs," stood out from the stack of about 20 submissions -- the names of their authors all redacted -- because of its tension between brutality and wonder. The poem contrasts the violent dissection of pigs in biology education with childhood understanding of faith and memory.

Mohabir, a British immigrant with Guyanese parents, said he never had the chance to meet or interact with Good, as he was teaching in Boston then and the contest was held remotely that year. But he said he was struck by the poem's idea that "we have to kill something in order to know it."

FAQs

Q1. What is age of Renee Nicole Good?

A1. Renee Nicole Good is 37-year-old.

Q2. Was Renee Nicole Good a poet?

A2. Renee Nicole Good was a poet and won the American Academy of American Poets Prize.