“Teaching, Listening, Supporting”: a review of Mary Ellen Redmond’s I HAVE ONE STUDENT by Gretchen Ayoub
I Have One Student
by Mary Ellen Redmond.
Finishing Line Press (June 26, 2026)
The one who writes his name backwards; the sixth grader who clutches The Iliad to her chest and has already read 100 pages, keeping a dictionary by her side; the one who never raises his hand except to give a disturbingly accurate answer to the question “What is a parole officer”; the one who never speaks; the one who speaks too much; the one who is in foster care; the one whose mother is threatening to send her to live with her father. These are just a few examples of “one student” in this beautifully written collection of the fourteen poems in I Have One Student, a thoughtful and insightful reflection of Mary Ellen Redmond’s twenty-nine years as a public school English teacher for grades 6-12.
There are so many layers here, so many ways to understand the backstories of students who come into one teacher’s classroom each day and how their lives give us a window into the larger community. We look into a world where young people are constantly doing their best to adapt to uncertainty and unpredictability. In “Vantage Point,” Redmond looks down from the second floor into the courtyard, where one of her Haitian students, Claudio—wiry, restless, talks out of turn— is already late to class. He looks around to make sure no one is watching him, drops to his knees and makes the sign of the cross. In “Public School,” Emma appears in class one day sporting a classic blue school uniform that her dad bought her from Amazon, the next day with an animal tail pinned to the back of her pants, chatting away about her baby brother, her pet gecko, the scary story she is writing. She talks so much to her teacher “Because you listen.”
Redmond taught on Cape Cod, a peninsula off the coast of Massachusetts, a bustling tourist area in the summer months, but also a place, like many seasonal communities, where it is easy to forget that people live and work there year-round. In “The Ocean Effect,” she writes: “In this blue-shuttered season of winter, I have fallen in with silence.” In “Quiz Tomorrow,” we read, “I wake to the dark drum roll of October rain, a street lined with vacant homes. White wicker, gas grills wait out the season in storage.” And in the heartwarming and heartbreaking “Anonymous Donor (For David),” Redmond writes of a moment in June, “I sit on the beach—read the text his father sends: new heart is in —all is well.” Her sixteen-year-old student David has undergone a successful heart transplant, and the enormous relief of the dad is encapsulated in seven words. She reads this text while an egret takes flight from a nearby marsh, boats dip and rise in the harbor, and scallop shells and mussels line the beach. I found myself going back to this poem a few times, re-reading about David and imagining the anxiety, the worry, and the relief, ending in a text read on a quiet beach.
This is an elegant and honest collection, one that belongs on the shelf of educators, parents, adolescents, as well as anyone who finds solace in the quiet days of nature in an off season. It is also a reminder of how poetry highlights the uniqueness of each individual we encounter in our daily life. I Have One Student will certainly occupy a favorite place on my bookshelf.
[Purchase I Have One Student here.}
Gretchen Ayoub is a success coach at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an editor for MicroLit . She was awarded first place in the Writer's Digest annual competition in the Memoir/Personal Essay category in 2023 and Honorable Mention in the Humor category in 2024. Additionally, Gretchen has published essays for the Boston Book Festival At Home Project, Consequence Magazine (book review), and The Tishman Review. She is currently working on a collection of travel essays focused on healing through grief.