by Alex Carrigan
The Great World of Days is a new anthology from Day Eight Press that collects poems from 54 poets who have been featured in the online literary publication Bourgeon. The website began to highlight the work from poets from the DC/Maryland/Virginia (DMV) area, but also gradually spread out to include writers from all over. The collection contains work from the website’s founding in 2007 to the present.
The collection’s poets cover a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, but it’s the common threads that helps coalesce the collection into something more whole. While the collection isn’t entirely DMV poets or poets who formerly lived in the DMV area, how the area shapes a lot of the pieces in the collection is quite notable. Several poems feature notable neighborhoods and locales like Jessica Wilde’s “My Garden at Vetheuil” being set at the National Gallery or Sally Toner’s “If John Waters Hung Out in Reston.” Waters isn’t the only local figure mentioned either, such as Luther Jett’s “The Busboy” written from the perspective of a busboy present at the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
However, what many of the pieces in the anthology bring together are the pieces that address various social issues and matters. Several of the poems are a timeless in the subjects they address, like when Lucinda Marshall writes “Solemnly I swear not to tolerate / the revision of history to fit / a fraudulent justification for / perpetual war or / wanton destruction of Earth” in “Patriotism Reconsidered.” Others address racism in our country, such as Kevin Wiggins’ “Criminally Black” or John Johnson’s “My Ancestors.”
Some other poets in the collection focus on current events or events that were current at the time the poems were written. Holly Karapetkova’s “The Story of My Father” speaks of a man who worked as a translator in the Cold War and how his study of languages gave him a wider perspective. “He wanted artistic license, he wanted to say beautiful things in those beautiful tongues. But there was nothing he could do, their conversations disintegrating, and he never changed a word, not intentionally, for 32 years,” she writes. “Dark Energy,” a poem by Susan Bucci Mockler, is written for the parents of the victims at Sandy Hook Elementary, a poem that becomes haunting with the recent massacre in Uvalde, Texas. She writes, “why must a coffin / hold a child, / why not rocks, mud, / burnt wind, even waters?”
The Great World of Days looks at poetry as activism and as a way to handle various sociopolitical matters in the world. By starting with the focus on DMV writers and expanding to wider areas, the collection demonstrates the evolution of Bourgeon. It shows how poets in the 21st century have developed their writing and promises some interesting work to come the further we head into this century.
Alex Carrigan (he/him; @carriganak) is an editor, poet, and critic from Virginia. He is the author of “May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry” (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Empty Mirror, Gertrude Press, Quarterly West, Roi Fainéant, ‘Stories About Penises’ (Guts Publishing, 2019), ‘Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear’ (Et Alia Press, 2020), and more. He is also the co-editor of ‘Please Welcome to the Stage…: A Drag Literary Anthology’ with House of Lobsters Literary. For more, visit https://carriganak.wordpress.com/
