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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
In the fourth episode of A Political and Literary Podcast, published on the occasion of Trump's inauguration to the office of president, six Americans poets, Stephanie Burt, Lynn Melnick, Monica Youn, Dorothea Lasky, Peter Gizzi, and Khadijah Queen read poems that register protest and mark a moment of political rupture. Their work is excerpted from the chapbook Poems for Political Disaster, which gathers poems from the eve of the twenty-first century to the month following Trump’s election—to summon the collective strength found in the languages of resistance and memory, subversion and declamation, struggle and hope.
Learn more about the chapbook and get your copy today!
The poems are read in the following order:
Concord Grapes, Stephanie Burt
Inauguration Poem, Lynn Melnick
A Guide to Usage: Mine, Monica Youn
Disaster, Dorothea Lasky
The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, Peter Gizzi
In the Event of an Apocalypse, Be Ready to Die, Khadijah Queen
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In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.
Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.
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