Poet, critic, and translator Joshua Clover has been distracted recently from his ongoing work on an English language edition of Jean-Marie Gleize’s Tarnac, un acte préparatoire, by this preposterous and sinister clamp down; Clover and eleven students face over a decade’s prison time and up to a million dollars in fines for peacefully exercising their constitutional rights to protest blatant injustices on the UC Davis campus. The Davis Dozen, as they’re being called, need your support. Begin by signing their online petition.

There is little subtlety in the ironic twist that the first full collection to be available to Anglo-American readers–by Gleize, one of the most important poet-critics of the latter 20th and early 21st centuries in France–is based on the story of the Tarnac 10.

Here is a conversation published earlier this year between Clover and Juliana Spahr, on poetry and politics. Mind the scare quotes.

And here is an article on Gleize’s work.