Thanks to Mark Bibbins, editor of The Awl (may that lovely site Rest in Peace), who reintroduced my poem that appeared there in 2016, “A New Gun Folds Up to Look Just Like a Smartphone,” to a new group of readers at the blog for the Best American Poetry series.
I wish the poem was less relevant today than it was then, but if the news of the past couple weeks are any indication, we’re no closer to solving this violent crisis than we were then—we might even be farther away. I think a lot of how we can cope with the cruel, nonsensical reality that we find ourselves living in—the kind of reality that would make room for these things to happen—and it seems to me that bewilderment and absurdity is the only logical initial response. We need to find a new way to wrap our heads around these problems; absurd reality needs to be looked at from an askew angle to make sense of it.
Brandon Amico 