How to Live Under Fascism: New Poems & Photographs

Black Widow Press, May 2025

How to Live Under Fascism: Poems and photographs by Andrei Codrescu. English

My new collection of poetry is a guide to living in the dictatorship of the new American plutocracy. I was born and raised in Romania, a national-socialist client of the Soviet empire, where poetry was always a nightmare for the state, and a lifeline to the terrified citizen. I emigrated to freedom in the U.S, where the subversive powers of poetry were slowly dissolving into badly-payed entertainment for easily distracted readers. The surveillance of the market wasn't yet as deadly as that of the communist censors, but their merger seems a done deal now. In the face of this civic catastrophy poetry has to be more than eau-de-cologne to dispel the stink of army boots. This book is occasionally clear about that, but there are also poems of love and the plague, childhood scents, the warmth of other bodies, the warnings of history, and the pleasure of making things up. I was taking photogaphs on my daily walks when writing these poems, without meaning to use them, but then I saw that they were strangely and not so strangely connected. My mother and father were photographers in the bad old days, I think their craft shadowed me. I dedicate these works to my predecessors:

tzara fondane celan

my dear anthologies
of gifts and misfortune
birth dates emigration dates
urgent breaks between wars
what is the plural of hiatus

illusions of freedom within
where the holes of culture used to be
now overgrown by words
tzara's good timing
the radical temperament of youth
your fucking bourgeois hypocrisy must die
fondane's bad timing
longing for summer pastures
i do mistake the pastoral for culture
these are my sheep
celan in the silence
after the apocalypse
translates the murmur
of the murdered mother tongue

How to Live Under Fascism published by Black Widow Press May 2025

Release date May 1, 2025 preorders available

ISBN: ISBN: 9798991139151, 185 pages