Three recent books by poets Valzhyna Mort, Eduardo C. Corral, and Claudia Rankine examine state violence by using violence’s signatures—repetition and accretion—as tools within the text. In these works, post-Chernobyl Belarus, barren American border landscapes, and the minefields of everyday social interactions are scrutinized, again and again.
Poems by Laura Kasischke and Valzhyna Mort explore the power that a fragment of language can have—especially a fragment heard long ago, and recalled in a space somewhere between recollection and invention.