Human Achievements

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women’s Studies. Art. HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS is full of friends, aching, bleeding, feeling fine, the city, and listening. You know the right song can change everything, and can be a conduit for energy or rage? ‘I look the day right in the eye and tell it to go fuck itself.’ The right song can also turn you into a ghost. — Amy Lawless

I feel so happy about this book of poetry by Lauren Hunter, ‘this unremarkable bloom’ whose key words are ‘human’ and ‘achievement.’ At a time when human is being cast as ‘without anything, ‘ Hunter’s poems remind us that efforts toward beauty, toward imperfect and beautiful thinking, is to be in an actual ‘human’ place, and that the reason one goes there is in order to love. HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS and the poetry writing it will inspire in me and others will be a barricade against the rapid loss of the human I crave, the human that I’ve taken pleasure in, a human that, without the defense of poets like Lauren Hunter, is ever, in every nanosecond, accelerating toward extinction. –Rachel Levitsky