These are poems of response —written out of pain, of bafflement, of frustration, of lament — as more of everyday life is run roughshod over by Trumpism, the disintegration of civility, disregard for Founding principles, and the sinking into oblivion of normative community decency. These poems are fragments, snippets that bear witness to the clutch of evil overtaking our neighborhoods and our neighbors — fragments of the creep of darkness we have yet found solid ways to refuse or thwart.
Maybe they are horror poems, not in genre, but recognition. Maybe they are the stutter of the everyday calling us, knowing that this has all been seen before and in a similar progression — a hermeneutic slap, old-school movie-like. The past remembers and offers warnings.
Set amidst this reality, the poems cling to and call for acts of care; they press for what Luce Irigaray calls love-to— a responsibility to the father as other that resists domination, abstraction, making the same, and erasure. [– a responsibility to and for the other as other that resists domination, abstraction, making the same, or erasing or discounting our intersubjectivity.] These are poems of loving-to the community.
As a writer, as writers, as citizens, and community members, as Americans, these poems cry and plead and claw to keep love alive. To keep decency alive. To keep hospitality and responsibility for and to the other intact — our common connection of place, meaning, and significance.
As writers and citizens, our work does not claim clarity or mastery. It arises from the same confusion, fear, and anger shared by those they depict. As writers, we report on and keep open the possibility of hope and Justice to come.
• • • The poems are sequenced roughly as they arose. But the sequence is not important. What’s important is the notice of evil rising and the claim or belief that a writer’s voice can make some difference.
