Author Description

WITNESS 2017-2020 chronicles four years of troubles, shootings, wildfires, racial reckoning, planetary murder, plague, monumental lies, crazy delusions, me-too, an uprising for justice, and more. But a failed far-right insurrection had to be the capstone of these terrible times, and the nation is not done yet. What was once unfamiliar and strange ("flatten the curve") has become common, even banal, demanding a poem. Language has to keep up, and Hilton Obenzinger presents a powerful testimony filled with rage, fear, laughter, and joy. Hilton Obenzinger bears witness to a time like no other in recent memory. A virus that won't let go, the raging fires provoked by global warming, and the state terrorism that menaces with neo-fascist criminality and has taken the lives of so many unarmed black youths all combine to shape a period in which we cry out for justice and for peace. These poems tell it like it is. When this poet tells us that he had a dream in which he was walking through beautiful woods with Moses, and that he doesn't mean Charlton Heston but "more like the old graybeard Walt Whitman," we know where these poems are headed. Go with them. I promise you won't regret it.