Winner of the CutBank Chapbook Prize, 2020

 

 

 

Ben Gucciardi: In this astonishing long poem, Craig Beaven skillfully braids the personal with the political, the lyric with the narrative, and the past with the present. Interrogating whiteness and his own positionality, Beaven says, 'I don’t want history / involved in this / embrace, but history / is involved / in everything.' Beaven’s interest in self-investigation is matched by his interest in the textures of sound and language, and by his insistence on finding the precise image to carry the poem forward in surprising ways. Teaching English Lit on the Day After a Shooting has much to offer all of us, alive as we are in a time of so many crises.

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