Reading and Booklaunch with Grant Cogswell

Grant Cogswell's poetic ode to progressive politics, The Dream of the Cold War, has its roots in the deep history of radical activism in Seattle and the North West. Pivoting around the tragic suicide of Congressman Marion Zioncheck, in 1936, a defenestration Cogswell has called "an assassination without a trigger man," the multi-part epic title poem moves dreamily across the 20th century and into the spectacle of Seattle's neoliberal transformation in the early 2000s. Lyrical, searching, crazy, Whitmanesque — these poems are the blood that runs through the body of a committed activist.

Poet and activist Grant Cogswell spent the 90s and 00s fighting political battles in his hometown of Seattle. Famously, he helped initiate a grassroots campaign to build a city-wide monorail in a place that had failed to build rail transit in nearly a century of trying. His grassroots proposal won, triggering an avalanche of legal maneuvers and politicking that ultimately subverted the mandate and stopped the project. The story is captured in Stephen Gyllenhaal's soon-to-be-released film, "Grassroots."