Poison Begets Poison, Poison Begets Poison

Owen Hill’s new collection of poems Poison Begets Poison begins with a simmering. Each quiet word contains a dormant flake of trinitrotoluene. The mildest statement threatens violence. It’s an anarchist’s guide to blowing up the vendors of corruption. And as you read, the danger builds. “A situation upheld only by crimes committed/So effortlessly would just as easily damage me.” We are all terrorized by the whims of our masters. But where lies the courage, the defiance, the will? the poet asks. “The gods of revolt knee deep/In a bog/Wading toward you but not very fast.” Then halfway through the collection, there’s a shift from Neoliberal ruin to local pretexts. Snapshots of hypocrisy, insincere platitudes, futile yearnings, the idiocy of choices. Hill writes as an insider: a laborer, a union organizer, an excellent novelist and poet. He coolly eviscerates the pleb’s experience and throws the guts in our face.Summer BrennerWhat is the condition of human consciousness in the new/old America of hate and suffocation? Owen Hill’s answer comes in the form of his most recent book, Poison Begets Poison, which uncannily and masterfully embodies our contemporary crisis with a Brechtian directness that braids critique with magic: “You may change but the cities may not / The stones don’t flatten to rubble at least / Not that you’ll notice we didn’t care / enough / To kill you the times just moved things along.” Poison Begets Poison is weird, breathtaking, entirely brilliant. We need this book desperately—and right now.Joseph Lease