We the Destroyers

We the Destroyers is a collection of poetry about the end of days. It's a collection about the pandemic, about grief and chaos and loss. But it's also a collection about survival and redemption and hope. Laura Passin takes the reader through recent years in the United States, where the pandemic and politics have ripped us apart. She trips through a timeline where we don't recover, where we don't mend our ways or change our habits. Then she carries us to a timeline where we find sanctuary and then, we come to the bitter end where We the Destroyers are the very thing that saves the world we've broken.

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Tangled in a forest of the Anthropocene, bewildered by personal griefs and global tragedies, Laura Passin's We the Destroyers seethes with outrage and despair. "Prayer is nothing," Passin writes. "I paid attention, but to what, to what? The city still erodes, the lake still eats the shore. The trees are still burning, the animals shrieking inside." Bearing the weight of our human legacy feels like swimming with a cannonball in our arms. There is no easy comfort here, but neither does Passin grant despair the final word. After all, poetry must also reckon with the poignant accident of our existence. "[To] find myself whole in a broken world," Passin concedes. "[T]o be stuck exactly where I am: what luck, what luck." We the Destroyers' hard-won moments of tenderness are no less true than its terrors. And that's something worth carrying.

~ Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater

In her fierce second poetry collection, Laura Passin harnesses the power of personal grief to sound a clarion call on behalf of our planet. Passin's precise, formally diverse elegies are animated by the fervent spirit of a manifesto, insisting that we maintain "the courage / to look death straight / in its toothless little face" and acknowledge our agency in nurturing the life that surrounds us. "We don't talk about the dead," Passin writes, "Already we have forgotten the fires, / the singed animals crawling through ash." The omnipresence of death in We the Destroyers motivates us to live with responsibility and compassion for all the life forms our planet has birthed. Passin's poetic voice is bold and deeply necessary for our current moment.

~ Carolina Hotchandani, author of The Book Eaters