Poetry as Witness, Poetry as Protest

Poets Hannah Lavery and Don Mee Choi are united by their embrace of work which is insistently both playful and political, writing as witness, archive and protest in an urgent and unpredictable world.

Don Mee Choi’s Freely Frayed gathers early poems, recent essays and translation notes by the National Book Award winner and grapples with the politics of distance and language in exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place and language.

The most recent collection by former Edinburgh Makar Hannah Lavery, Everything Everyday, is a formally innovative poetic journal of the year, in which personal confession and public ritual converge. The book’s richly textured sequences weave together everyday moments of joy with the unfolding chronicle of contemporary grief and protest.