WHAT WE DID WHILE WE MADE MORE GUNS Dorothy Barresi's newest poetry collection What We Did While We Made More Guns is available from Pittsburgh Press as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. PBS recently published an article about the book titled "'What we did while we made more guns’ confronts the violence of extreme belief.'" You can read two of Barresi's poems, including featured selection, "Face," in our Winter 2013 issue. "The poems in What We Did While We Made More Guns investigate the place where economic failure meets a widening acculturation of violence—a kind of Great Acceleration of soul extinction set in this spectacularly uneasy moment in American history. Cutting, comic, sorrowful, at times terrified, at times resolute, the poems tilt along the high cliff’s edge of identity anxiety and American moral uncertainty, where each of us plays our part in the business of dispossession or resistance. Building themselves out of jazzed-up verbal velocities and wounded (in)sincerity, the poems counsel resilience against all forms of battery, mortal, spiritual, financial. They are pattern-makers in the dark. They talk back to God. They take into themselves what cannot be taken back: the news that forty-six million Americans have “slipped” below the poverty line; that guns discharge monstrously banal virility; that a black woman pulled over for a routine traffic violation dies by strangulation in her jail cell; that we buy and sell the myth of the American Dream as though our lives depended on it." Dorthy Barresi will be reading April 8, 2018 2:00-4:00 p.m. at Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049, and on March 31, 2018 at 4:00 p.m. for a Celebration of the American Journal of Poetry at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, CA 90291.