The Banality of Power by James Byrne PRE-ORDER
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Summer 2026
Broken Sleep Books
Published 31 May 2026
In The Banality of Power, James Byrne anatomises the everyday mechanics of harm, tracing how cruelty becomes procedure, how violence is normalised, and how authority hides in plain sight. These poems move from Eichmann’s glass cage to boardrooms, tabloids, riots, outsourced pain and climate breakdown, always alert to the way institutions convert human lives into abstraction. Byrne braids political witness with history and myth, channeling England through its Boudiccan roots and Roman invasion, finding Shelley on the shores of Italy, standing up to how corporate banality blameshifts or sidesteps away from justice. Fierce, lucid and sometimes darkly funny, this collection insists on moral attention without offering false consolation, holding open a space where anger, grief and tenderness can sharpen into resistance.
PRAISE for The Banality of Power:
The Banality of Power posits Hannah Arendt’s point perfectly: evil can reside in the most ordinary of settings, be that in a restaurant, a bar, the musings of an overpaid columnist with bad hair, the latent imperialism of a postage stamp. Byrne’s work captures this idea through a taut tapestry of poems that place the disconnect between people and dominant structures under the spotlight. It elucidates power as phantom but all too human, faceless and yet so easy to identify, generic and yet still terrifying. This book highlights Byrne’s continuous ability to conjure up the historical with the everydayin waves of resonant, vibrant language. A scope that easily flows between the local and the global, essential for poetry that is right here, right now. Work to be shared and disseminated.
— Sarah Crewe
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