I’ve Been Reading About Disaster Lately is a collection of original poetry which focuses on how identity and agency are shaped through personal and public circumstance, through the intersection of the human and animal, and through the development of language and personal mythology. This collection is preceeded by a critical introduction which analyzes how poets mediate public and private disaster. The introduction specifially focuses on the eight poems written by Bob Hicok in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech Shooting, and examines how language, either in its presence or absence, functions to resolve the disconnect between pre-disaster and post-disaster.