POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
 
In The Banality of Power, James Byrne anatomises the everyday mechanics of harm, tracing how cruelty becomes procedure, how violence is normalised, and how authority hides in plain sight. These poems move from 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 Shelley on the shores of Italy, standing up to how corporate banality blameshifts 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.
 
PRAISE for The Banality of Power:
The Banality of Power posits Hannah Arendt’s point perfectly: evil can reside in the most ordinary of settings, be that in a restaurant, a bar, the musings of an overpaid columnist with bad hair, the latent imperialism of a postage stamp. Byrne’s work captures this idea through a taut tapestry of poems that place the disconnect between people and dominant structures under the spotlight. It elucidates power as phantom but all too human, faceless and yet so easy to identify, generic and yet still terrifying. This book highlights Byrne’s continuous ability to conjure up the historical with the everydayin waves of resonant, vibrant language. A scope that easily flows between the local and the global, essential for poetry that is right here, right now. Work to be shared and
disseminated.
   — Sarah Crewe
 
ABOUT James Byrne:
James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent books are Nightsongs for Gaia: New & Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2025) and The Overmind (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). 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 (Arc, 2012) and Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences by Rohingya poet Ro Mehrooz. Byrne works at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.