THE CENTURY forthcoming 13 October 2020

My third collection, The Century, will be out from Milkweed in mid-October. You can preorder it already. The code LORSUNG will get you free shipping if you order it from Milkweed’s site. Mark Austin Speaker did the book design; the cover is an image of the town of Dixmuide in Belgium during the war.

From Milkweed’s copy about the book: “In the tradition of witness poetry, The Century tugs apart the quotidian horrors required to perpetuate acts of violence like the Holocaust, the deployment of nuclear weapons in Japan and Iraq, American slavery and its lingering aftermath. When Éireann Lorsung writes of death and dying, of “bodies in the fields becoming the fields,” it’s the simplicity that’s most haunting. After a fire, “some of their skin moved off of them as they ran, a very / simple melting…” But these poems don’t just witness; they also resist and serve as models for resistant lives. Pushing back against form and grammar, constructions of time and geography, Lorsung traces decades of technological, geopolitical, and cultural shifts through generations and across continents as networks of dominance continue to be stubbornly upheld.”