Amerigun: Poems

In her heartrending sixth collection of poetry, Anne Marie Macari communes with a brother decades gone and calls out a gun-obsessed America has enabled countless similar deaths.

In Amerigun, a stunning collection of loss and rediscovery, poet Anne Marie Macari revisits her brother Edward’s long-ago death by a self-inflicted gunshot. Interweaving and disentangling her own memories and those of her family, and by reconstructing a legal and medical paper trail, Macari begins a dialogue with the dead, bringing her brother’s lost voice back to her after years of sealing herself off from him. Embedded in her story is the devastation of a culture that elevates guns and violence over the sacredness of human life. Yet, out of that devastation, Macari writes a kind of love story, renewing her connection with her brother, as well with other departed friends and family. By revisiting grief, she uncovers a deeply-felt gratitude for the world around her—and indeed for her own life.