Irredenta
A sequence of poems that interrogates American civics and citizenry from its foundation in the pastoral tradition.
In Irredenta, Oscar Oswald raises the prospect of pastoral opposition to state power, elaborating and investigating the genre through ethical and spiritual inquiry. As a citizen is a stranger to itself, so too does Oswald’s pastoral speaker define the tensions between identity and nationality inherent in a civic body as they are traversed across the American political geography: land, water, and country, from the Mojave to Wisconsin.
Oscar Oswald is the author of Irredenta, an Editor's Choice manuscript published by Nightboat Books in 2021. The collection engages the pastoral tradition from the American context of Thoreau, Stein, and Niedecker. His poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Blackbox Manifold, and Fence, among other journals. He has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he was a Black Mountain Fellow. He has also served as an Assistant Editor for Noemi Press and as the Poetry Editor for Witness.