In his poetry collection The Banality of Power (Broken Sleep Books), James Byrne, teaching professor of literatures in English (A&S), anatomizes the everyday mechanics of harm, tracing how cruelty becomes procedure, how violence is normalized and how authority hides in plain sight.
These poems move from Adloph Eichmann’s glass cage to boardrooms, tabloids, riots, outsourced pain and climate breakdown, always alert to the way institutions convert human lives into abstraction. Byrne braids political witness with history and myth, channeling England through its Boudiccan roots and Roman invasion, finding Percy Bysshe Shelley on the shores of Italy, and standing up to how corporate banality blame-shifts or sidesteps away from justice.
Fierce, lucid and sometimes darkly funny, this collection insists on moral attention without offering false consolation, holding open a space where anger, grief and tenderness can sharpen into resistance.
Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist, and his books include “The Overmind,” “Places you Leave,” “The Caprices,” “Everything Broken Up Dances” and “Nightsongs for Gaia: New and Selected Poems.” He has co-translated and co-edited several books of poetry, including “Bones Will Crow,” the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English.
