Poems for Political Disaster

Harvard Book Store and Boston Review present readings by LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO, PETER GIZZI, JORIE GRAHAM, MAJOR JACKSON, RICARDO MALDONADO, NATHAN XAVIER OSORIO, and MONICA YOUN, from a new chapbook, Poems for Political Disaster. The chapbook features both new poems and selections from the Boston Review archive that record, refract, subvert, or otherwise respond to political trauma, catastrophe, or terror—both here at home and abroad. The evening will be hosted by Boston Review poetry editors TIMOTHY DONNELLY, B.K. FISCHER, and STEFANIA HEIM.

About Poems for Political Disaster

"In time of crisis, we summon up our strength," wrote poet Muriel Rukeyser. This collection gathers poems—from the eve of the twenty-first century to the month following Trump’s election—to mark a moment of political rupture, summoning the collective strength found in the languages of resistance and memory, subversion and declamation, struggle and hope. Poetry is a counterforce. We offer these poems to readers as Rukeyser did—"not walls, but human things, human faces."

"When freedom is in danger, when you are asked, in one faked way or another, a shabby admonition, to leave your own humanity which includes the humanity of all, the alarm is extra-ordinary, America. Don’t you think so? You must respond, America. You must speak out, you must write." —U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, from the Foreword