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Éireann Lorsung

Éireann Lorsung works and teaches in a field of images, objects, movement, and texts. A 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, her books include Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and The Century, all of which were published by Milkweed. More at ohbara.com.

Poetry  – 
Ecotone 35 cover, the Labor Issue

Being a fragmentary history of the United Farmworkers Movement; of their surveillance by the illegitimate authority of the so-called “United States Federal Bureau of Investigation”; of the possibility of solidarity; of the worker and the student; of the fact that class position and racialization are entangled in racial capitalism; of the beauty of the strike; of the true war on poverty which is abolition of whiteness and police and bosses and landlords; of the warmth of the grapes and the smell of them; of the hundreds of miles marched with the blue lady and her roses on a banner overhead; of the boycotts which reached even little white households like the one I grew up in; of the triumph of human dignity despite truncheons; of the land in the morning under the lifting fog; of the file holding the names of Filipino organizers and workers, and Mexican organizers and workers, and Black radicals and organizers and workers, and white college students (‘outside agitators’) and so being a document of material hope, which is action, not emotion; of migration (a natural process and a human right); of labor and skill; of, that is, fuck the cops and long live the union, composed as it is of imperfect people; of the right to rest and water and toilets and movement and wages and safety and medicine and schools; of the farm implements glinting in the sun and the human bodies there working the land with them: Part One

“Cesar Chavez was roughed up by some farmers” / “El Malcriado” / “Eyewitness Account of Big Farm Strike” / “Huelga,” which according to the caption means strike in Spanish

Poetry  – 

Garden cycle (keeping time)

Early blue lavender (Munstead) and air cannons over grain fields / (the pheasant, visiting us regularly now, startles in the hedges) // Rosemary flowers like minuscule orchids (and insects see how to go). . . .