Five years have passed since the United States first invaded Iraq, and recently the American death toll passed 4, 000. “It’s difficult to think about,” says Jennifer Karmin, who is collecting 4,000 words, ten words at a time, for the 4,000 dead in Iraq from authors, friends, strangers and anyone who will send them in. “I want to have a public memorial and bring the war physically back to Chicago. I think that the number 4,000 is shocking, and I’d really like people to ponder it.” Karmin will be reading the 4,000 words and another war-related poem entitled “Revolutionary Optimism” May 2 during Looptopia beginning at 5pm in front of the Vietnam War Memorial at Wabash and Wacker. “We haven’t been seeing images of the dead or any sort of body bags or caskets,” Karmin says. “Perhaps when some people hear the number 4,000, it will hit home for them.” The sobering exhibition may seem strange for the celebration that is Looptopia, but Karmin says that goes with the territory of art. “Art isn’t always about pleasure and beauty,” she says. “Sometimes you have to think of the difficult things. It’ll be interesting to see the response.”
We Can’t Delay Our Joy: An Interview with Roger Reeves About His New Book, “Dark Days: Fugitive Essays” Reeves has a shelf full of honors, but his new book, “Dark Days,” is not poetry, but essays. In rich and heady prose, Reeves mixes memoir, theory and literary criticism. His subjects range from an opera singer breaking a silence curfew by singing in the streets to the “hush harbors,” where enslaved people would steal away to pray.
Lit 50 2023: Who Really Books In Chicago Our role in the world seems increasingly ephemeral, which is why so many of us take refuge in the endurability of words on paper, whether in novels, poems, essays or biographies. And Chicago's role in the world of literature has never been stronger.
