Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s People on Sunday was written partially in response to violence leveled at political protesters—O’Brien among them—at the University of California-Berkeley, where he teaches poetry. But in his own poems he largely confronts the unexploded terrors: the workweek slipping into the weekend, not as relief from the grind but merely a “distraction” owing to “the way we’re taught to imagine days / As reprieves from other days.” This precludes us from doing our own writing on the wall—although “here is a wall and some chalk,” and what the wall ought to say is that corporations have replaced both democracy and the voice of God.
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By Geoffrey G. O’Brien (Wave Books) Reading Wed 9/4, 7:30 PM as part of Danny’s Reading Series Danny’s, 1951 W. Dickens dannys.noslander.com.
