Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith, “Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity” (Sundress Publications, 2016)

Readers gather around: Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) is an anthology for a new era.

As Cathy Park Hong states at the end of her New Republic essay, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and it is Not Kenneth Goldsmith”: “poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.”

This anthology stands with a significant few who are helping to usher in or marking this renewed time of social engagement through poetry. Up and coming poets are balking at the instruction to stay away from the political, the politicized, and the instigative. We are writing about the body as we have come to understand it, not a version sanitized for comfortable consumption.

With two editors–Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith–at the helm who were fully present in their responsibility to broadly represent the politics of identity, this anthology is unafraid. It refuses to apologize and instead insists that it is owed some genuflection.

Unified in their disparate realities, these 65 poets sing, perform, and present their versions of life, love, and loss across spectrums and time lines. Listen here for four of these exceptional poets to share their work.

This anthology, these poets, and these editors understand that literature has a responsibility to reinforce or establish empathy; it is not merely a mirror or means of self-appraisal, it has a responsibility to act as connective tissue.

Pick up a copy of this anthology today. Share it, give it as a gift, teach it–let these poems flex and stretch throughout the world.

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