The Century - by Éireann Lorsung (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"This book is our textbook for the education we most need." --<b>DAN BEACHY-QUICK</b><p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>Winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award in Poetry</b><br> <b>A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2020</b> <p/> <b>A meticulously detailed catalogue of ordinary people performing acts of extraordinary violence, <i>The Century</i> charts an awakening to structures of dominance and violence.</b> <p/> In the tradition of witness poetry, <i>The Century</i> tugs apart the quotidian horrors required to perpetuate acts of violence like the Holocaust, the deployment of nuclear weapons in Japan and Iraq, American slavery and its lingering aftermath. When Éireann Lorsung writes of death and dying, of "bodies in the fields becoming the fields," it's the simplicity that's most haunting. After a fire, "some of their skin moved off of them as they ran, a very / simple melting..." But these poems don't just witness; they also resist and serve as models for resistant lives. Pushing back against form and grammar, constructions of time and geography, Lorsung traces decades of technological, geopolitical, and cultural shifts through generations and across continents as networks of dominance continue to be stubbornly upheld. <p/> <i>The Century</i> is evasive but thorny, splintering in the mind. This collection is a reminder that the arrival of each new century, decade, or year brings with it an invitation to join ongoing movements of resistance, air pockets of hope in the waters that we all swim or drown in. <p/><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"One question poet Éireann Lorsung asks in her new collection, <i>The Century</i>, is how citizens contribute to societal structures of violence and control. Slavery in the US and the Holocaust are but two of the most glaring examples. Lorsung's collection comes at a time when studies about the roles average people played in the perpetuation of Nazism and Italian Fascism abound, to say nothing of the 'minor' violences that often define interpersonal relationships across lines of color, gender, creed, and more." --<b>Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2020"</b> <p/>"<i>The Century</i> is an exceptionally rewarding experience with an unrelenting gravitational pull . . . In recent memory, I can't recall being drawn so powerfully into a literary work." <b>--<i>Portland Press Herald </i></b><br><p><br></p><p> <p/>"<i>The Century</i> is in part a record of [Lorsung] grappling with her responsibility as a white person within a system she believes is rigged in favor of whiteness. Throughout the book, she returns to images--of thread, fog, and scrims--to track how her upbringing trained her not to see certain aspects of race . . . It feels remarkably prescient after a summer of nationwide protests following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police." --<b><i>Minnesota Alumni</i></b> <p/>"Lorsung's poems do not reach for beauty--they reach for accuracy. They preserve and map while knowing that maps have been used to dispossess. The poems' power comes not from experience being transformed by lyrical presentation, but by assemblage of keenly perceived reality." <b>--<i>Cleveland Review of Books</i></b><br></p><p><br></p><p> <p/>"Éireann Lorsung's <i>The Century</i> looks back and locates its necessary ethical work in the ongoing half-life of our irradiated past, seeking nothing less than to own up to, if not reconcile, the complexities and complicities of our moral failures. Those failures, from the bloody history of racism to the violent light of nuclear war, lurk in us as does a radioactive isotope, decaying us from within. Lorsung knows beauty cannot end our responsibility, and it is not beauty these poems seek. They search instead for something vastly more important, the ethics hidden in aesthetics, a realization by which we might find some means to alter our awful ways, to stop ourselves from wielding force against another, to stall the force that uses us for its tool, to not let our own hands become hammers breaking themselves apart. Let us be honest. Let us be sane. This book is our textbook for the education we most need." --<b>Dan Beachy-Quick</b> <p/> <p/>"In her new collection, Éireann Lorsung vividly enacts poetry as archeology, where each line glistens with sobering light in a careful unmasking that insists upon an urgent question: 'To see, or not to see./ Who can not see?' <i>The Century</i> embarks on a deeply honest reckoning with the mythology of white innocence, artfully sifting through history's wreckage to turn over the missing obscured by monument, redaction, atom-splitting, social geography--the inventory goes on. The past and future are each wings tethered to a questioning gaze, naked, blinking the light. Yet these poems pulse steadily in the heart of this moment, unwavering, and most of all tender, as 'the silver-tipped fingers holding this pen' seek a new kind of seeing that asks us to hold each other whole."--<b>Monica Ong</b> <p/> <p/>"With <i>The Century</i>, Éireann Lorsung braces us for--and against--the tectonic 'crush of history.' These poems are a reminder that every instant is itself nested among names and infinite correspondences, phantom loves and testimonies, the knots of languages and artifacts that give it life, that weigh it with grief. And so it is time to map our wrecks, to reckon with Lampedusa, Americium, Nasiriyah--to face the public square, the spectres of Pacific atolls, the warm shadows of fathers and brothers, uncles and mothers. As Adrienne Rich once wrestled with how the 'reading or hearing of a poem can transform consciousness, ' Lorsung activates the past, the future and the 'even now, ' challenging us to trust that 'There is no excuse for not learning / to see. No excuse for not learning to / listen. No excuse not to work.' "--<b>R. A. Villanueva</b> <p/> <p/><b>Praise for <i>Her book</i></b> <p/> <p/>"In <i>Her book</i>, Éireann Lorsung inhabits the uncertain and fluid boundaries between the body and the world, the self and the other. For the poet, the word searches out the image and gives it substance. For the reader, these poems offer a materiality of their own: '[The body's] speech packs around it like wasp / paper. Speaking a thin, permanent / archive.' The poems in this volume breach the ordinary parameters of space, time, and sense perception. To experience them is to occupy the space between in a surprising and yet subtle way." --<b>Kathleen Jesme</b> <p/> <p/>"These poems believe in the miraculous--part primordial, part philosophical, part whimsical. Lorsung goes places other poets just hope to inhabit--breaking form--creating new. She shows so much about beauty without abstracting it to an idea. This is a perfect blend of body and soul; and the kind of writing poetry sometimes dreams of being." --<b><i>Washington Independent Review of Books</i></b> <p/> <p/><b>Praise for <i>Music for Landing Planes By</i></b> <p/> <p/>"Éireann Lorsung's <i>Music for Landing Planes By</i> presents us with a beguiling voice that is light without being weightless....The lyrical nature of her composition and the surprises that hand at the end of her verses make this assortment of delights eminently re-readable. Ms. Lorsung's young triumphs deserve much more attention than they've yet received."--<b><i>Washington Times</i></b> <p/> <p/>"The reward of her collection is her celebration of all physicality, all flesh and construction. She is attentive wherever the body and its tools meet... Her poems unite bravery and delicacy." -- <b><i>Georgia Review</i></b> <p/> <p/>"<i>Music for Landing Planes By</i> is, above all, a testament to artisanship, a belief in carefully crafting not just poems, but clothing, a cake, a piece of music.... This collection is a celebration of making things, and so a valuing of them and the world. It is ebullient, generous, tender verse." --<b>Michael McKimm</b> <p/> <p/>"In this amazing first book, Éireann Lorsung enters deeply into the everyday--only to emerge awestruck, open and generous. In her hands both the world and the word are transformed into something radiant." --<b>Nick Flynn</b> <p/> <p/>"Éireann Lorsung's debut volume, <i>Music for Landing Planes By</i>, is a young woman's love song to the planet. Images flock from a vivid pastoral world, uncarded fleece, wrens in thatch, chaff, lathe and hasp, joining the speaker in her effort to stitch prayer and dream, city and country, into one shimmering fabric of ardor."--<b>Leslie Adrienne Miller</b> <p/></p><p></p><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Éireann Lorsung</b> is the author of two previous collections of poems: <i>Her book</i>, and <i>Music for Landing Planes By</i>, which was named a New and Noteworthy collection by <i>Poets & Writers</i>. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2016. Since completing an MFA at the University of Minnesota, Lorsung has studied printmaking and drawing at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice and taught high school in rural France. While living in Belgium, she ran a micropress called MIEL Books and a residency space called Dickinson House for writers and artists. From 2017-2020 she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing - Nonfiction at the University of Maine, Farmington.
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