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.