Irredenta

A sequence of poems that interrogates American civics and citizenry from its foundation in the pastoral tradition.

In Irredenta, Oscar Oswald raises the prospect of pastoral opposition to state power, elaborating and investigating the genre through ethical and spiritual inquiry. As a citizen is a stranger to itself, so too does Oswald’s pastoral speaker define the tensions between identity and nationality inherent in a civic body as they are traversed across the American political geography: land, water, and country, from the Mojave to Wisconsin.