unhappy endings
More than a decade ago I wrote a book explicitly bout the apocalypse. Or maybe it was a book about different kinds of apocalypses instead of any specific one. There were vague dangers, nuclear bombs, underground houses, and zombie attacks for sure, all the stuff of dramatic end-times scenarios. Really, I was just watching a little bit too much Supernatural and the central series "apocalypse theory: a reader" just sort of formed out of it. I enjoyed reading these poems during a slew of readings in the summer of 2013. A couple years later, the book was done and was scooped up by a press who had published my work before. The next couple years had a lot going on, including finishing SEX & VIOLENCE and it finding a home at BLP, the loss of my mother, lots of work-related drama and happenings. By the time the press shut down, which I wasn't sure was what was happening because I was frankly afraid to ask, so much was going down. In 2018 and 2019, I was barely hanging on to my mental health by a string, and then in 2020, there was covid. By then SEX & VIOLENCE was in the world and I just decided to issue an electronic version of that older book and move on (and actually, it was easy since most design work had already been done on the interior.) It's worth a read and fun little bit of imagined endings. What I didn't know was that I would keep writing about it.
In early 2018, during a sprint of daily writings I wrote a steampunk-ish series called ordinary planet, in which climate change and massive floods produced a futuristic alternative planet world very unkind to women, whose choice was domesticity or pretending to be mystics fortune tellers (inspired by the famous Fox Sisters, of course). In 2019, when I was gifted some time and reading gig at the Field Museum, I wrote extinction event, a series about extinction as a gathering, like a gala, that no one wanted invitations for. The poems that arose during covid could also be considered in a similar vein. bloom, the most autobiographical series of our time under lockdowns, but later the strangeness of existing in that world just reemerging, with the plague letters .Similarly, when I wrote unreal city, inspired by Eliot's The Wasteland, in late 2021/early 2022, the end times felt like they, themselves, were ending. These series were scattered across different book projects--AUTOMAGIC (ordinary planet), COLLAPSOLOGIES (bloom and the plague letters), ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER ( extinction event.) Each book, with the exception of COLLAPSOLOGIES, which also has an apocalyptic feel overall, with its own subject matter and thematic concerns.
I did not set out for RUINPORN to be so bleak, but it happened. the Eliot-inspired series kicked it off, in a time where it felt like we were all white knuckling our way through life. Or maybe it was just me, with job stresses followed by job changes (good ones, but scary at first). With more loss after my dad passed in 2022.)I literally intended that to be my last book with that apocalyptic feel. I was ready to move on, to be kinder in my view of the world and its future, but the events of the last 5 months or so have me reconsidering. I am not sure what to make of the world in poems, but its showing up in a strange way in the new, more sci-fi poems I've been writing to go with a set of collages I actually finished in 2023 but wanted to revisit.
As for book projects, the next two in progress are not apocalyptic, and while dark (one slightly witchy and about the natural world, the other more focused on history, literature, and legend) they may be less bleak than some in the past.
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