Mixtape

In the introduction to the poetry anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forche writes: "We all know that atrocities have taken place on an unprecedented scale in the last one hundred years. It becomes easier to forget than to remember." What can one person do? Debbie Hall, in her book Mixtape: Marginal States, shows us: we can witness our atrocities. Mixtape: Marginal States is filled, not with finger pointing, but evidence. As Forche continues, "The poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion." Join me, and others in reading Debbie Hall's powerful poems of witness.

-Ron Salisbury, San Diego Poet Laureate (2020-2021)

Debbie Hall's Mixtape: Marginal States is not for the timid. Rather, it's for the bold lover of poetry, those who welcome the lyrical of society's joys and traumas. Those who are willing to delve into the hideous to find beauty, to abandon intellect for intuition. To question, to examine, to remain uncertain, while finding the balance where hope challenges anguish, and the fear of apocalypse is quelled.

-K-B Gressitt, publisher and co-founding editor of Writers Resist.

As attested by her bio, Hall's photographer's eye has served the reader well in this collection. Indeed, at this fraught period of time, when Orwellian memes punctuate so much of what we consume intellectually, these may very well be the individuals that we most need to meet; to read their stories recorded in a variety of shifting poetic forms by the author. Some of them have names, others we come to know simply as vagabonds: unhoused, unheard, undocumented-all of whom we tend to not see when walking by them. Souls, in the author's words, weathered to gray dull as the sky overhead. Hall shines a light on all of them, also illuminating the reader with a purpose in mind: for us to come / back to our senses.

-Robt O'Sullivan Schleith, Escondido Arts Partnership and San Diego Poetry Annual Regional Editor