Western Heaven

What makes atrocity a commonplace makes monstrosity a moral duty In Western Heaven, award-winning poet Stephen Sexton grapples with the slippery and urgent question of what it means to live in the West today. As an Irish writer located at the geographical ‘mid-west’ between Europe and the US, Sexton’s poetry lives simultaneously at the centre and in the margins, providing an illuminating vantage point from which we can view the West’s mythologies of perpetual decline and generous abundance. Ranging across time and space, these poems conjure mummified Egyptian remains, American GIs and folktales, cowboys and Casablanca, and W. H. Auden sipping his vodka martini in a 1939 New York bar. Echoing the Modernist poets of the interwar years and the legacies of intergenerational conflict, Sexton draws startling comparisons between our ‘monstrous’ era and the genocides of the twentieth century that prefigure ours. A work of lucid moral and emotional force, which weaves profound entanglements between Capital, Christianity and Empire, Western Heaven reckons with what it means to be simultaneously complicit in the West’s project of violence and a beneficiary of its decadent spoils.