Today's poem is "In a Time of Thuggery"
from Elevated Threat Level
Rachel Galvin
is the author of News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford UP, 2018) and co-editor, with Bonnie Costello, of Auden at Work (2015) and a poetry collection titled Pulleys & Locomotion (2009). She is translator of Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets (2013) and co-translator, with Harris Feinsod, of Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo (Open Letter Books, 2018). Poems and translations appear in The Boston Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, MAKE, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, PN Review, and Poetry. Her criticism appears in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Jacket 2, MLN, and Modernism/modernity. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective. Galvin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Books by Rachel Galvin:
Other poems on the web by Rachel Galvin:
"In Wartime There Are No Civilians"
Three poems
Two poems
Rachel Galvin on Twitter.
About Elevated Threat Level:
"Perhaps every poem is a riddle for which the answer is the poem itself. Perhaps each of these adroit lyrics by the poet, critic, translator, and activist Rachel Galvin is a riddle for which the answer is the entire world in all its sad, brutal, and delightful contradiction. For surely every brief lyric in this book feels simultaneously triaged amidst a world of active damage and precisely poised, resourceful, nimble as a needle, quick as a stitch. For surely every brief lyric in this book has the dazzle and dismay of a candle, just as it goes out."
"These ingenious, funny-sad, empathic poems are woundingly precise in their exposure of a pattern of world-damage, of power misused 'in our name.' The recent history spotlighted in Galvin's poems is nauseating, but it's rendered with such pleasurably incisive phrasing and sonic swerve that I look up from the book awake, clarified, galvanized to face again the music and the news. "
Joyelle McSweeney
Catherine Wagner
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