We Interrupt This Broadcast: Poems

From a master lyric poet characterized by Mary Oliver as “a Walt Whitman without an inch of Whitman’s bunting and oratory” comes this late-life collection that takes its overall title from the venerable phrase that alerted listeners and viewers to an urgent event of public significance. Again and again, the poems in We Interrupt This Broadcast dramatize, in simple and deep language, what it feels like to be alive in our time.

The disconnects that haunt and animate these poems are political, ecological, and psychological. Some, like “Un-Earth: A Sequence,” revisit early trauma experienced both intimately and socially, while others contemplate our present ecological crises.

Set against this somber background of disconnects, Gregory Orr invokes the natural world and human intimacy as sources of growth and hope. Giving voice to both personal and universal anguish, We Interrupt This Broadcast repeatedly transforms desolation into celebration, silence and suffering into song.

From “So often there’s a disconnect . . .”

So often there’s a disconnect:
You know the world
Is ending and you eat your soup.

I’m weeding in my garden
As a flash flood warning
Comes my way, complete with siren.
The sky’s gray, but nothing else
Indicates so dire a situation.