War News
December 2023
AGITATE! announces the publication of our first digital book—War News by Beau Beausoleil. War News is a collection of 90 poems written everyday by Beausoleil since 8th October, 2023. The poems in the collection reflect on what it means to bear witness to war, killing, and destruction in Gaza, Palestine. It asks, what it means to be alive at a time when even the death and suffering of children fails to elicit a response strong enough to end the war. This collection of 90 poems is a witness testimony from afar. It is an archive of grief, mourning, and solidarity. It is an accounting of the cost of war. Through these powerful and devastating poems Beausoleil reminds us that we cannot turn away. In the poet’s own words, “[O]ur humanity, our collective morality, requires that we bear witness and then take some kind of action.”
A selection of 24 poems from War News was also published by Moving Parts Press.
Listen to Beau discuss War News with Geneffa Jahan on the Hive Poetry Collective.
Beau Beausoleil is a poet and activist based in San Francisco, California. His two most recent chapbooks are: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023). These poems also appear in the online Moving Parts Press Digital Poetry Series as Poems for George Floyd and In Ukraine: Poems. He is the founder of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a global arts response to the car-bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street (the street of the booksellers) in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. It is a project of witness, memory, and solidarity with the Iraqi people by poets, artists, and writers.