By Leah Umansky

Umansky’s Of Tyrant walks the wide-lined, recitative path of Walt Whitman, but rather than echoing Whitman’s swaggering American optimism, Umansky unfolds the litany of 21st century American tyranny. “you thief / you liar / you sheep / you hedge of darkness,” she addresses the tyrant. “This is not a choir. / I will not sing,” she writes, and what she does instead is spin, spit, perform, and improvise. Umansky writes poems that take up space, that self-reflect, that sling gargantuan words like cruelty, fear, virtue, desire, and love. To live under tyranny begs for big gestures, and she provides. In the process, Umansky’s book embodies and ritualizes the epic defiance required to survive this epic period of social and spiritual trauma.—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize