The Century: Poems

By Éireann Lorsung

b>A meticulously detailed catalogue of ordinary people performing acts of extraordinary violence, i>The Century/i> charts an awakening to structures of dominance and violence./b>br>br>

In the tradition of witness poetry, i>The Century/i> 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.br>br>

i>The Century/i> is evasive but thorny, splintering in the mind. This collection is a reminder that the arrival of each new century, decade, or year brings with it an invitation to join ongoing movements of resistance, air pockets of hope in the waters that we all swim or drown in.br>br>

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781571319463

Éireann Lorsung

Éireann Lorsung is the author of two previous collections of poems: Her Book and Music for Landing Planes By, which was named a New and Noteworthy collection by Poets & Writers. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2016. Since completing an MFA at the University of Minnesota, Lorsung has studied printmaking and drawing at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice and taught high school in rural France. While living in Belgium, she ran a micropress called MIEL Books and a residency space called Dickinson House for writers and artists. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing - Nonfiction at the University of Maine, Farmington.

Book preview

[1]

A tendency to survive after disaster

April 26, 1986; March 11, 2011

Cherry trees are growing up through the house.

This morning we found another slug climbing the kitchen wall.

I’m going to tell you once:

the day you leave you’d better

do it all. No coming back.

No carloads.

Get your suitcase

and get out.

Within thirty miles of the disaster site animals’ bodies are useless.

At first embryos just dissolved. Being in reverse.

We went back to cells, back to what it was safe to eat.

The cherry tree

through

the front window is a sign

that things go on.

Counting roentgens

we made

our way through sumac,

elk droppings.

If you’ve left laundry on the line, don’t go back; it’s raining now.

I’m lying on the bed and preserving the shape of your body

even though your body isn’t there.

I’m stroking the indent with one most gentle finger.

Rationing this too.

The blankets are glowing. The sheets in the closet are alive.

Saplings grow through things that soften.

I can feel the small trees starting in my abdomen.

Beloved you have forgotten one shoe here in the room.

You started

down the road

before me—

I can still see the shape

of your back—our house

and our cherry

trees crying out

for the living,

mattresses

decaying, my

papers floating

out the door

beyond you

the ashes

of another city—

The veil of dust is attached to almost everything

and someone is beginning the new song,

the one we sang that day, in the dark, when even the notes were