Book Club #2: Feb 26, 2021 (Registration link inside)

This collection contains 53 different poems; I will aim to discuss two per day throughout February. (Obviously, this was harder than I thought. But it's a learning moment; specifically, the complex nature of analyzing a poem and then placing it in conversation with other poems within the same collection).

As we wait to get our individual copies, I'd like to first take a second to think of the title: The War Makes Everyone Lonely and consider how these different poems could/might be unified around this theme. While this is only an assumption, I'd argue it's an appropriate inference to be made when approaching a text, especially a collection of poems.

In the acknowledgements, Graham Barnhart lists 17 different publications that first published these poems:

• 32 Poems

• Adroit Journal

• Beloit Poetry Journal

• The Boiler

• Diagram

• Diode

• Gettysburg Review

• Gulf Coast

• Horsethief Books

• Iowa Review

• Pleiades

• Poetry Northwest

• Prelude

• Sewanee Review

• Sycamore Review

• Tinderbox Poetry Journal

• Waxwing Literary Journal

Before digging into each poem, I'd like to share these publications with you, in order to support your own development as poets and readers of poetry. I think it is a testament to these poems that different publications decided to publish them.

As we read The War Makes Everyone Lonely, think of questions you have for the author.

Recently, Tyler James Carroll over at Dead Reckoning Collective sat down with Graham Barnhart, Marty Skovlund Jr., Leo Jenkins, and David Rose to do a multi-episode series titled, Veteran Writers Discussing War and Literature.

Leo Jenkins has posted here before and came to January's meeting. These videos are a good introduction to DRC, Jenkins, Barnhart, as well as multimodal texts and learning from other writers.

"Chapter 1: The Process"