836: A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck

Today’s poem is A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck by Ilya Kaminsky. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Jason Schneiderman writes… “Today’s poem is from a sequence of poems about a town that has been invaded by an occupying force. Both sides believe that they are on the side of right, and both sides justify their violence by calling it a response to the other side’s violence. The poet’s sympathy is certainly with the occupied people, and as a Ukrainian American poet, Ilya Kaminsky’s poems have become relevant in a new way, as they speak to the atrocities we are currently witnessing in his country of origin.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp