Important Groups

a chapbook

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. Between April and December 2024, I was writing a long poem. Some of you heard me read from it (in Buffalo, Amherst, Cleveland, online via Kansas City…). I came to think of this poem as part of a conversation we were having across these moments and cities. Now it’s become a chapbook, published by the Cleveland-based small press Community Mausoleum. Profound thanks to editor Zach Peckham.

Like many of you I haven’t known, I keep not knowing, how to think and to live this past 15 months, in which we were conscripted to bear witness as our government—as the American economy, seemingly all of our tax dollars, our retirement funds, whatever this money is that we always seem to be generating and losing—funded and armed a technologically massive assault on a small densely populated civilian area, funded and armed a genocide in Gaza. Once again protests were widespread and that didn’t matter or at least not enough. I emerged as an adult into the 2003 invasion of Iraq and I couldn’t believe then that this kind of injustice and imperial violence was just going to happen, that the US was really going to do this and did. And now, this past year, it was “our” party (if we could ever say that), the Democrats, in power. A blue genocide. I began writing and reading this poem as a small ongoing personal effort to ask our so-called liberal institutions what they were, what they ever could be, now that we could see what they really were. How did the moral betrayal of our institutions take form; how may a new beginning arise. These are their stories.

If you’re interested, you can order the chapbook here, and it will be mailed to you from Cleveland. Love and solidarity, HP.