Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Coffee House Press
Published:15th Apr '21
Should be back in stock very soon
National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky pens an incandescent indictment of capitalism’s moral decay.
In Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unjust policing of certain bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy, against hate spreading like a virus. He grieves for children in cages and those slain in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. But pulsing amid Borzutzky’s outrage over our era’s tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice. Borzutzky’s strident language juxtaposes the horror of consumer-culture violence with its absurdity, and he masterfully shifts between shock and heartbreak over the course of the collection. Bleak but not hopeless, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is an unflinching poetic reckoning with the twenty-first century.
Praise for Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
A Chicago Review of Books Must-Read Books for March 2021
“An urgently contemporary project, rejecting the pretense of retrospective distance in order to mourn from within chaos.” —Hannah Aizenman, The New Yorker
“A panoramic and formally various investigation of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. . . . Borzutzky’s arresting writing sings and stuns as it addresses difficult, painful truths.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The poet’s voice has echoes of Waldman and Olson. The poems are at times conversational and incantatory. . . . critical and ambitious, most damning in its understatement and reflection.” —Joseph Houlihan, Chicago Review of Books
“A broken god of a book. . . . These are not just poems of compelling witness, but unimaginable, unforgettable songs of grief.” —Paul Cunningham, Action Books
“Stunning. . . . Global capitalist ironies become punchlines but also give way to protests, from Chile to Chicago and beyond.” —Urayoán Noel, The Latinx Project
“The imagery is clear and direct. . . . The simple—but not simplistic—writing, pulls you in.” —David Rullo, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle
“Sprawling in its rage, from the concentration camps at the border to police violence to the scourge of mass shootings, this collection uses language to identify the unspeakable.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Borzutzky reminds us that poetry is and has long been a tool of reckoning and refusal, a way of singing for what has been stolen, slaughtered, stifled. These are the songs we must learn to sing.” —Tracy K. Smith
“Among these pages, emotional and spiritual selves gather to find cadence in perspective. Borzutzky offers us a testament to the written breath—to hear poetry’s fault line, running through each of us.” —Edwin Torres
“I can’t do anything but bow. This is lacerating work.” —Achy Obejas
ISBN: 9781566895996
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
120 pages