[2][3] On November 9, 2011, O'Brien suffered a rib injury in an altercation with police, while attending a peaceful protest.

[4] O'Brien's poem "Fidelio" was published in the March 19, 2018 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

[5] O'Brien touches on the most pressing questions and dilemmas of being human in this time and place with welcome playfulness, for example, situating "tower" and "Guadalajara" as an off-rhyme, explicitly noting the juxtaposition within "the rhyme of laws and loss," and doubling up negatives, as in "not here but not/ Not."

According to reports O'Brien spoke out to a police officer who was hitting a Berkeley student because he would not break his link in a human chain.

The police officer hit O'Brien in the ribs, a reaction he would later call "brutal.