Incivilities

Poetry. In her first collection, Barbara Claire Freeman links lyric subjectivity to an exploration of crucial moments in U.S. history. There are meditations on the Declaration of Independence, institution of slavery, Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark Expedition, Civil War, Great Depression, terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as on our contemporary economic and cultural lives. These formally inventive poems braid the personal and the political. They offer no compromise, no synthesis, but they do offer hope as they invite critical reflection of "authorized history" and trace the efforts of historical subjects to make and remake their lives. INCIVILITIES is committed to the past and to the present, envisioning a poetry that might function both as a ritualistic act of imagining and as a talisman against forgetting.