First Friday Poetry

Boys Whistling like Canaries is a mesmerizing journey through the political cruelty of the twentieth century. The connecting thread is the relationship between father and son, parent and child, and the complexity of basic survival in the face of the annihilation wrought by inhumane disregard. Sweeping through a landscape framed by religion and literature, the poems argue that history has consistently failed to inoculate us against war and oppression—against the tyranny of governments who turn on their people, people who turn on their neighbors—even as the voice behind those poems refuses to lose hope for the eventuality of Lincoln's "better angels of our nature."