Addonizio's poem tells her readers about “some terrible act that sends you reeling off.” Many such acts occurred during Addonizio's lifetime as well as in the years before her birth. As she observes in her poem, some events are so shocking that “even when you know” what people are capable of doing to one another, these appalling acts defy belief. In many ways, the twentieth century was defined by a succession of genocides, including that of the Armenians in Turkey (1915-1918), Stalin's crushing of the Ukrainian revolt (1932-1933), the Japanese murder of Chinese in Nanking (1937-1938), the Nazi Holocaust (1938-1945), the Khmer Rouge's slaughter of Cambodians (1975-1979), the Rwandan slaughter of Tutsis (1994), and the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia (1992-1995). Through these events, upward of seventeen million people were killed simply because they were of.....
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