Fort Necessity

"Fort Necessity takes a darker turn than David Gewanter's earlier books. Here the lively, inventive language of his imagination moves from and beyond the personal into a more public realm, with a series of powerful documentary poems about the human misery and violence resulting from the greed of industrialists, the brutality of prisons, and the cruelty of back-and-spirit-breaking, insufficiently compensated labor. What's most remarkable is that even when Gewanter's poems are put together from direct quotations--Andrew Carnegie, Tarbell's history of Standard Oil, Emma Goldman, Mother Jones--they convince you that nobody but David Gewanter could have written them."--Lloyd Schwartz, author of Little Kisses
"David Gewanter has always been a writer of immense tonal range, his poems moving effortlessly between tenderness and Swiftian invective. Fort Necessity is his finest collection thus far, thanks in no small measure to his magnificent title poem, written in a documentary mode, that recalls American masterworks such as Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead and Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, while at the same time featuring searing composite portraits of the most cutthroat of cutthroat capitalists, from Frick and Rockefeller to the brothers Koch. Gewanter shows us what an authentic poetry of resistance can look like--tough, uncompromising, and at the same time consummately artful."--David Wojahn, author of World Tree