If Men, Then: Poems

By Eliza Griswold

A darkly humorous new collection of poems by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Wideawake Field and Amity and Prosperity

If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold’s second poetry collection, charts a radical spiritual journey through catastrophe. Griswold’s language is forthright and intimate as she steers between the chaos of a tumultuous inner world and an external landscape littered with SUVs, CBD oil, and go bags, talismans of our time. Alternately searing and hopeful, funny and fraught, the poems explore the world’s fracturing through the collapse of the ego, embodied in a character named “I”—a soul attempting to wrestle with itself in the face of an unfolding tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374713706

Eliza Griswold

Eliza Griswold is the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. She writes for The New Yorker, is the Ferris Professor and Director of the Program in Journalism at Princeton University, and lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.

Book preview

PRAYER

What can we offer the child

at the border: a river of shoes,

her coat stitched with coins,

her father killed for his teeth,

her mother, sewing her

daughter’s future into a hem.

Alone, but for a brother who shoves her

ahead through the barbed-wire fence,

knowing she’s safer without him—

a truth she cannot yet fathom,

being too young for the ways of men.

Nothing is what we can offer.

The child died years ago.

Except practice a finer caliber of kindness

to the stranger rather than wield

this burden of self, this harriedness.

Humility involves less us.

1

PRELUDE TO A MASSACRE

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

into a village,

is not a metaphor

but prelude to a massacre.

Marred by violence,

my mind begs forgiveness,

self-conscious at its pattern of reprise.

This old song can’t stop singing itself:

If men,

Then …

The bright clatter of boots

on the slats of a bridge,

the mustachioed laughs,

the rise of the first lime-

washed wall of the village,

and behind the wall,