Daniel Borzutzky & Poupeh Missaghi Live Reading and Conversation

National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky will read from his newest poetry collection Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018– a provocative and incandescent indictment of capitalism’s moral decay. Borzutzky will share our virtual stage with author and translator Poupeh Missaghi for a live reading, discussion and audience Q&A. This event is in proud partnership with Coffee House Press. In Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unjust policing of certain bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy, against hate spreading like a virus. He grieves for children in cages and those slain in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. But pulsing amid Borzutzky’s outrage over our era’s tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice. Borzutzky’s strident language juxtaposes the horror of consumer-culture violence with its absurdity, and he masterfully shifts between shock and heartbreak over the course of the collection. Bleak but not hopeless, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 is an unflinching poetic reckoning with the twenty-first century.