American Occupation: Dispatches from Minnesota’s Resistance to ICE
Jonny Diamond and Su Hwang, Editors
American Occupation documents an extraordinary outpouring of literary witness while the memory and consequences of Operation Metro Surge continue to reverberate in communities across the country. More than a record of a single moment, American Occupation places Operation Metro Surge in conversation with the longer history of American expansion, imperialism, borders, and the US government’s abuse of power against its own civilians. The collection asks readers to consider what happens when the machinery of occupation turns inward, and what forms of resistance become possible when ordinary people refuse to accept terror as normal.
Kaia’s essay, “There Is No Time For Mom Guilt” appears in the anthology alongside a chorus of Minnesota writers.
The War Requiem
A Finalist for the 2021 Minnesota Book Award
Winner of the Essay Press & University of Washington at Bothell MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics Book Contest
Published by Essay Press, 2020
“Kaia Solveig Preus is a major new talent, and The War Requiem brilliantly defies categorization as a virtuoso synthesis of poetry, memoir, historical fiction, musical scholarship. This is literature and this is music and this is art.” ––Benjamin Percy
“Art is not an alternative to the world. Art is not an escape from, not a solution to the world. Art is the world. The War Requiems (Britten’s music and Preus’ book) remind us art can renovate the world.” ––Rebecca Brown
“In precise, incandescent prose, Kaia Preus’s War Requiem weds the instrument of the human voice with the instrument of the essay for a reverie against silence and death. Like Benjamin Britten, but with words as her medium, Preus sets to a taut lyricism the letters and lives of Wilfred Owen and Britten interspersed with her experiences as a reader, singer, and writer. The choral effect is profound and heartfelt and reminds that while ‘a life cannot last. Music can.’” ––Jennifer Kwon Dobbs