Human Nature: Poems of Witness is a remarkable and wonderful telling of a life in and out of poetry and music, as well as political and cultural struggles... Each poem reveals DeGenova as a new world truth utterer who has mastered the absolute necessity of revelatory poetry and originality... Reading, studying, and sharing
Human Nature makes it for me a new addition to the poetry of Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry, Muriel Rukeyser, and countless others who question "unrightness" approaching real evil.
from the Foreword by Haki R. Madhubuti,
poet, educator, founder of Third World Press
Entitled "Tell the awful truth," the keystone poem that grounds Albert DeGenova's new collection, Human Nature, signals the project's overarching concern: that each of us is morally responsible for examining and learning from the critical moments of our lives, with clear-eyed honesty, especially from our myriad failings. This is how the poem ends: "I write one true sentence, our only last defense - Bear witness." As a reader, be ready to travel carefully across personal, social, ethnic, and racial terrains. Remember to watch your step. The upside of such difficult work is that only by bearing witness can we bear the bountiful fruit of living a truly meaningful life.
-Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, poet, playwright, educator
Although the first and last poems in Albert DeGenova's Human Nature are exhortations to "bear witness" to the rise and return of systemic inequities, violence, and fascism in 21st Century America, the tenor of the whole collection is more about looking back on the 20th Century. The speaker of these poems examines his personal and political pasts, sifting through the troubling rubble created by history and refusing to decompose. He is often nostalgic about the ways in which art, especially Chicago jazz and blues, spurred a lifelong process of unlearning the dehumanization of "other" human beings in terms of race and class. Ultimately, Human Nature enacts the ongoing work to de-naturalize the worst of our perceptions, especially those of "us" with historical privilege in America.
-Virginia Bell, poet, senior editor of RHINO magazine
