Poems / January 29, 2024

from Earth’s Last Word (A superstitious poem)

Valerie Hsiung

Disobey authoritarians, support The Nation

Over the past year you’ve read Nation writers like Elie Mystal, Kaveh Akbar, John Nichols, Joan Walsh, Bryce Covert, Dave Zirin, Jeet Heer, Michael T. Klare, Katha Pollitt, Amy Littlefield, Gregg Gonsalves, and Sasha Abramsky take on the Trump family’s corruption, set the record straight about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s catastrophic Make America Healthy Again movement, survey the fallout and human cost of the DOGE wrecking ball, anticipate the Supreme Court’s dangerous antidemocratic rulings, and amplify successful tactics of resistance on the streets and in Congress.

We publish these stories because when members of our communities are being abducted, household debt is climbing, and AI data centers are causing water and electricity shortages, we have a duty as journalists to do all we can to inform the public.

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Onward,

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Valerie Hsiung

Valerie Hsiung is the author of multiple poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming 2024), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), selected by Renee Gladman for the 2021 Essay Press Book Prize, and outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the 2019 CSU Open Book Prize. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

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