throwback thursday | strange machine
In the time between 2012 and maybe early 2015, I wrote a whole book of poems about the apocalypse. It may have been spurred by the fervor around the 2012 doomsdayers or maybe just one too many re-watchings of Supernatural. It contained a series of poems about apocalypses in general, but also segments on zombie girls at the mall, creepy underground houses in Nevada, and strange machine, a series about midcentury nuclear fascinations and fears. It was full of afternoon matinees, bikini clad movie stars, and Oppenheimer himself, as well as the American ego-ism that got us here in the first place. That whole book did not get quite a proper launch (the press who took it on closed shop before release.) Luckily, we were in the proofing stages, so it was easy to turn it into an e-release I shared a couple years after. It was technically my 7th full-length book, sandwiched between SALVAGE, which came out in 2016 and SEX & VIOLENCE that debuted in 2020.
It was merely my first book about endings, however, since I've obviously gone there again with subsequent projects. COLLAPSOLOGIES (which feels like my own version of a pandemic book amid a sea of other pandemic books) , as well as RUINPORN (which I guess is my obligatory post-pandemic book.)While the former is filled with poems written in the thick of 2020, both personal and less so ( the overlook series, the witchy working girl poems, and my tabloid project) the latter is more dealing with grief, both on a personal level (I lost my dad in the midst of writing it in 2022) and a societal one as we picked up a lot of wreckage and rebuilt things again in the aftermath (and perhaps the biggest question as an creative, exactly what to build as I struggled with whether I should keep writing or go do something else more productive.)
This series is definitely more societal than personal. Initially it was a squarish little print zine I created, but I eventually made a scanned e-version, which you can still read here.
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