Planet Auschwitz by Gary Myers

Like Charles Reznikoff and Anthony Hecht, Gary Myers turns to the documentary mode to render an unimaginable horror.  His nerveless, well-crafted, and surreal reportorial account is haunted by ghosts who will keep you awake long into the night.  Planet Auschwitz is a humane book wrenched from an inhumane world.

–Edward Hirsch

In Planet Auschwitz, Gary Myers grapples with “forms of cruelty that defy description” and takes us to “the edge of humanity.” Haunting yet tender, baffled by atrocity but by no means naive, these poems resist easy answers and operate under the guiding principle that remembering is an active practice, not a passive act. At a time when those with power try to deny history as recent as last week, it seems all the more important to have poets like Myers undertaking the difficult work of witnessing.

–Jim May

Planet Auschwitz dares to enact an anatomy of the evil involved in the so-called Final Solution. To do this, these poems eschew the perpetrators’ didactic conformity. These quatrains whisper rather than march or goosestep as they examine machinations that strip their victims of identity, separate the families, and destroy any signs of cultures the regime deems different or inferior. At the same time, Myers reanimates specific objects like a comb, a leaf, some castanets, a braid, a pair of glasses to bring back to life acts of bravery, endurance, resistance, and love. We shudder even to think of these objects as keepsakes or souvenirs to maintain the chance Myers gives us to establish an allegiance with the many silenced people as if we “see through time” and we stand “among those / standing in the cold.” These poems will soften the hardest hearts.
–Richard Lyons, author of Heart House.