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The American middle class ...

By Dawn Lundy Martin

The American middle class is screwed again but they don’t know it.
Politics is a gleaming nowhere. Žižek fantasizes about Capitalism’s
inevitable end. Reviewers want these poems to be more hopeful.
Love is obvious. She’s a tutu shelter leaning out! Love is miraculous.
She’s twirling quite naturally! We dangle our feet in a July swimming
pool. Shoots sparkles from our eyes—to quiet to quiet all our little
monsters. Street habits rear up. Any fire. Any quell. Who’s made it
to well being? The television projects hysterical grief. Brown women
wailing fall to knees draped over. We are only who we are supposed
to be. No moon tonight, dear one.

Added: Friday, April 15, 2016  /  From "Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life," (Nightboat Books, 2016). Used with permission.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Photo by Max Freeman

Dawn Lundy Martin is author of three books of poetry and three chapbooks. Of her latest collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015), Fred Moten says, “Imagine Holiday singing a blind alley, or Brooks pricing hardpack dandelion, and then we’re seized and thrown into the festival of detonation we hope we’ve been waiting for.” Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Martin is a member of the three-person performance group, The Black Took Collective. She is also a member of the global artist collective, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, the group that withdrew its work from the 2014 Whitney Biennial to protest the museum’s biased curatorial practices. Martin is currently working on a hybrid memoir, a tiny bit of which appears as the essay, “The Long Road to Angela Davis’s Library,” published in the December 2014 New Yorker magazine. She lives in East Hampton, NY and Pittsburgh, PA. Learn more at Dawn Lundy Martin’s website.

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