Of Consequence: featuring Stefan Lovasik

On Monday, May 17th at 8:00pm EDT, Of Consequence partners with the Paul Pratt Memorial Library of Cohasset, MA to present author and Viet Nam veteran Stefan Lovasik and his third collection of poetry, The Latitude of Mercy. The event will include select readings from the new book and a Q&A session.

Register for this event.

Registrants will be emailed a zoom link two hours prior to the event.

“The responses to war in our literature are as varied as its many authors over a long period of time, but what the best of it—from Homer until the present—has in common, is the direct, unadorned presentation of the brute facts of war and the subsequent lingering physical and moral consequences war imposes on its survivors. Stefan Lovasik’s poems collected here take their place alongside the best of it—the most direct and most powerful, artistic representations of war in poetry. His poems reveal a stripped down and shockingly real encounter with what most of us cannot even imagine, so that his reemergence again on the other side, among us with his stories reconstructed over many years of grief, is all the more amazing. I believe it is possible to understand things about what combat does to human beings from reading these poems that you can’t find anywhere else. That’s why there is an urgency here, why I want you to read this book now so that these poems can help empower all of us to resist our inclination towards war, and to love peace. There has never been a worthier purpose than that for poetry.”

—Bruce Weigl, author of On the Shores of Welcome Home (2019)