“Winter,” an abecedarian poem from Mark Nowak’s forthcoming book, …AGAIN, documents the attack at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. These innovative and trenchant prose poems expand the long traditions of documentary poetry and social poetics through the structure of the English alphabet, letter by letter. Nowak compiles, splices, and reshapes Trump’s Twitter archive and excerpts from his January 6th speech at the Save America March, notes taken while watching hours of livestream videos, Google maps, bird guides, figures from Greek mythology, newspaper reports, “fake news,” and more to critique the alt-right’s attempt to overturn the U.S. election.
Winter is offered as a free PDF download formatted to read on screen or to print, fold, bind, and circulate, in the great tradition of artistic and political pamphleteering. Issued on January 6, 2024 by Kenning Editions in chapbook format to mark the anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Winter will remain available until it resurfaces in the larger collection to be published by Coffee House Press.
Mark Nowak is a poet, social critic, and labor activist whose books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, and Social Poetics. He edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is the founding director of the Worker Writers School.
Reader’s version download here.
Booklet version download here [print double-sided and actual size, fold, and then bind].