So Where Are We?

“[Joseph] is a 21st-century Virgil, a guide to the wreckage we’ve made of enlightenment. Across 20 or so beautiful poems, he tries to live and to love and to know where he is while wrestling to the ground all the new languages of violence . . . An Arab-American from the great labor city of Detroit, with its anguished history of racialized violence, one might say Joseph was made for this moment. What beauty and horror he wrenches from the degraded syntax of modern life. Intimate, brave, outraged, hopeful; I’ve not read a book more of and for our times than this collection.”—John Freeman, Lit Hub

“Joseph’s poems are necessary, immediate, somehow absolutely now and eerily ancient. Themes of his previous collections—Lebanese and Syrian Catholic faith and culture, the memory of Detroit, life in New York City—are resurrected here, but this new book feels like a stake in the ground. The interrogation of the title is whispered throughout as a fear. Maybe we are in a moment unlike any others? If so, Joseph has the care and reach to document our present . . . Joseph is the kind of poet who helps us parse the prophecies from the noise.”—Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

“Lawrence Joseph’s So Where Are We? poses an apt question that resonates throughout the collection as a Socratic nervous system in a time of international woe. The phrases touch up against each other in a tango where the sacred and the profane converge to reveal the interconnectivity of lives and dreams. Indeed, the collection speaks for personal and public democracy, as if made of something more than words—almost metallic, but lyrical and beautiful. So Where Are We? runs on the wheels of passion. And each poem is an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent intimacy that embraces the complex density of truth.”—Yusef Komunyakaa

“Finely crafted . . . Joseph presents delicate stanzas made up of short lines that cast a spell of passion and sensuality. These powerful poems reach across time and distance, public and private, fact and feeling to trace the unity of the human experience.”—Raúl Niño, Booklist

"With lawyerly intelligence, Joseph dissects a litany of contemporary horrors related to war, the police state, and economic precarity . . . The collection’s extraordinary power [lies] in bearing witness to the 'switchblades then gunshots, police in riot gear,/ media coverage, front page headlines.'"—Publishers Weekly