I really don't think I set out at the beginning of the year to write a book about capitalism and it's evils, and yet, somehow I did. It probably has everything to do with the fact that I was starting a series of poems right as the lock-downs kicked in and the arguments over people's lives vs. economic stability came to the forefront. Of course, at first it was hard to write at all, even from the relative safety that allowed me to work from home (but of course what was also tinged with job-related anxiety because most of my work requires access to the library's physical collection.) I had been meaning to write poems about my favorite horror film, The Shining (and on any given day, perhaps my favorite film no matter the genre). It seemed fitting to work on that series under quarantine, especially since I've often thought that sort of isolation, barring evil bloodbaths, would be so nice for my creative brain.
It was rough to get started, but once I did, it didn't end up being the series I thought it would. Then there was bloom, which was less about economics, but very much about the pandemic. And then. my tabloid inspired pieces, which are my very favorite, and now, as I round it out, the plague letters. In august, the bones of the book began to take shape, and scribbled in my notebook, from around the time the quarantine started I had a title that was ever so perfect. COLLAPSOLOGIES. I was thinking about disease and colony collapse and also financial and societal collapse. That is the soup from which these months and months of poems come from, and I am excited to pull them all together and see what I have as soon as I finish the last few epistolary poems, likely by mid-October.
I initially though this one might be good to get out into the world sooner rather than later, but I feel I need to site with them a little longer as a whole--but keep an eye out for some smaller bits to make their way out, be they zine/chapbook projects (hint, hint, Halloween seems like a perfect time to drop overlook) and some of the other individual fragments will be appearing in journals. I have some design ideas for some of the other series that may become something.
