State of the Union: Fifty Political Poems Book

A political anthology from the front lines of American poetics.

Publishers Weekly

Politics are on everybody's mind. Wave editors and poets Beckman and Zapruder enter this slim gathering of poems-charged with cynicism, seething, sadness, surrealism and schadenfreude-into the discussion. From big names (John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton) to contemporary favorites (Terrence Hayes, Peter Gizzi) and newcomers (like Mathias Svalina, whose "Forgiveness" is a highlight: "This is a lesson on/ forgiveness: the scar/ forgives the knife"), many of these poets come at politics with hip aesthetics and liberal leanings. In her spare, affecting opener, Noelle Kocot writes, "Look at the landscape,/ A lot of damage, no?" Matthew Rohrer, addressing Dick Cheney, admits "it is a very good thing/ to watch you die." Yet many of these poems seem reluctant to answer what may be their central questions: What exactly is a political poem? What is a poet's responsibility toward politics? What can a poem accomplish? Or maybe the uncertain attitude often on display is a kind of answer for an America where it's become so hard to trust or tell what's going on, where, as Joe Wenderoth says, we must look to "transparency after transparency/ adorning whatever it is that moves us/ no closer to knowing." (Sept.)

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