In The News and Other Poems, David Citino confronts and attempts to make sense of the news. He explores the good and bad ways the world has of careening into a life and sending it off course. Citino tries to understand how we come to know what we know, driven as we are by haughty assumptions about the world we’re making and the control we think we exert over our own lives and loves.
While still holding romantic notions of ivory towers and ivy-covered garrets, Citino welcomes the latest information—no matter how bad the news. He struggles to understand stories from sources impeachable and unimpeachable—supermarket tabloids and journals of science, folklore and the laboratory, chronicles of ancient history and news wires, even those sometimes terrible things we learn from our doctors or those we love.