1968

“… this is the ’68 / whose pulses still surge / in my psyche,” writes author Edward Sanders. What he’s done with that surge is to take memoir, anecdote, and factual research and fashion them into an epic, book-length poem. Sanders is distinguished among the poets of his generation by his engagement with history, including its missed chances, wrong turns, broken hearts. He evokes participation, performance and prophecy in a fury of emotional tones and swirling facts, chronicling the laughter and terror of his own creative annus mirabilis as freak/ poet/ publisher / Yippie activist / rock star in the midst of the near-breaking of the nation. He looks back toward his generation’s vital and tragic sources, reconstructing the decisive year in a unique commingling of personal and political poetry.