There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis

Author: Cynthia R. Wallace

in Ploughshares at Emerson College 2021

To read There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, out this month, is to plunge back into the summer of 2020. The collection, edited by two-term U.S. Poet Laureate—and former Ploughshares guest editor—Tracy K. Smith and Knopf executive editor—and former Literary Hub executive editor—John Freeman, documents this period of quarantine and protest, bewilderment and commitment, like a collaborative textual time capsule. The book is also like a map, depicting not just time, but place.

There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love gathers forty entries, many of them first published by Lit Hub in a series called “Letters Home.” These letters—and poems and essays—insistently locate themselves. They are written from, and at times written to, Miami and Seattle, Wisconsin and Texas, Hawai’i and Georgia, Sacramento and Minneapolis. Together they suggest a dispersed cloud of witnesses, an American representation not electoral but literary, the perspectives as inescapably political as they are personal. FOR MORE

This information is suggested by my good and long-term friend Mimi Mulcrone