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Editor’s Note Consider this: “We don’t want war. We just want freedom.” This said by a twenty-seven-year-old protestor as she marched in a peaceful protest in the streets of Tehran. Isn’t this what most people in this world want? Yet freedom has to be fought for. Carolyn Forché in her groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting writes, “One of the things that I believe happens when poets bear witness to historical events is that everyone they tell also becomes responsible for what they have heard and what they now know.” It was in this spirit that through PEN USA I called on sixty prominent American poets to raise their voices in unison against the whirlwind of oppression that has polluted our world. It is time to fight the way we as poets know how: to bear witness, to collectively engage, to activate, to call, to give texture, to demand, to caress, to shatter, to build, and to never let the world forget. In the words of the great Arab poet Mahmoud Darwish, “Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.” From Damascus to Beijing to Tehran in every revolution or uprising , poets are among the first to be jailed. But the voice of the poet cannot be arrested. Like rain their words seep into every crevice where people have been driven underground and feed the seedlings that eventually break through the cracks in the streets, squares and walls of their countries, changing the landscape despite oppression, torture, and denial of the most basic human rights. In this collection, sixty prominent American poets speak in unison addressing the world through poems that not only meditate on the principles of freedom, justice, and tolerance but also boldly and directly address specific countries. All the poems have been gifted to this anthology so that a portion of the proceeds benefits PEN Center USA, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which freedom of expression is guaranteed for all writers. Poets are a threat to despotic regimes as light is a threat to darkness . Yet consider this: light is most brilliant when it travels through darkness. Here you will find some of this light. xi ...

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