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In this article, I explore an experimental form of writing I term poetic juxtaposition. Drawing from Glesne’s poetic transcription and Prendergast’s use of found poetry as literature review, I define poetic juxtaposition as the creation of research poems that artistically combine qualitative data, excerpts from theoretical texts, and words from every day and popular culture texts. To illustrate the technique, I present three poetic juxtapositions from a critical parent child autoethnography and describe the processes that lead to their creation. The three poems demonstrate how I utilized poetic juxtaposition to make sense of data, establish emergent themes, achieve crystallization of findings, and present my work to a variety of audiences. I conclude by suggesting how this technique might be taken up by others.

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This research poem is part of a larger parent-child autoethnography examining the ways in which my own white children learned race and racism in the context of an attempted antiracist home curriculum (Thomas 2019). The ethnography took place in a hypersegregated Midwestern metropolis with data collection spanning from 2015 to 2019. Using a process I term poetic juxtaposition (Thomas 2020), I set data and found poetry from relevant literature (Prendergast 2006) side-by-side with lines from Muriel Rukeyser's poem, "Ballad of Orange and Grape." Poetic juxtaposition places data, found poetry from the literature, and popular culture texts side by side in poetic form in order "to explicate relationships between data, theory, and the broader culture" (Thomas 2020, 2). Although this process of poetry making is similar to the process poets working in the humanities may employ, it is decidedly research focused, resulting in a research poem that's purpose is to evocatively depict research findings (Marlatt 2017). Indeed, many poets employ found poetry in their artistic work, but qualitative researchers must be more careful to catalogue where such words were found. I choose to employ endnotes in my poetic juxtapositions to cite sources without interrupting the flow of the poem (Thomas 2020). Crafting this poetic juxtaposition helped me both analyze data and share the finding that my family's use of the race labels Black, Brown, and white 1. served to maintain the ideology of a Black/white racial binary.In Muriel Rukeyser's "Ballad of Orange and Grape," she explores the implications of binary thinking, labeling, and mislabeling through description of a street vendor who pours grape drink in the container marked orange, and orange into the one marked GRAPE (1973, 46). I lean on her metaphor in this poetic juxtaposition to explore the ways in which my family's use of racial labels served to reinforce discourses of a Black/white binary that positions all people on a continuum from white to Black and measures racial identity in terms of proximity to either of those understood-to-be opposite poles (Deliovsky and Kitossa 2013; Harpalani 2015). I begin the research poem with found poetry from the literature review. Then I use poetic transcription (Glesne 1997) to share three interactions in which my children, aged five to eight years at the time, demonstrated binary thinking in which they attempted to label people they interpreted as not white in proximity to Blackness. The interactions include my daughter's talk about the 2014 movie rendition of Annie in which Annie is played by Quvenzhané Wallis, my son's racialization of his darker skinned cousin by marriage, and my daughter's experimentation with using color words as race labels to describe the friends she made in first grade. The final poetic transcription is a depiction of my attempt to disrupt our Black/white binary thinking through a reading and discussion of the book Mixed Me (Diggs 2015). I conclude the poem with found poetry from Nishi's (2018) theoretical writing on cri...