2040

by Jorie Graham, Antonella Francini (Translator)

In questa lettera aperta al 2040, Jorie Graham evoca un futuro probabilmente inevitabile. Come una storica o una cartografa, disegna un mondo apocalittico dove la pioggia deve essere tradotta, il silenzio canta più forte delle parole, gli uccelli sono artificiali e l’America come la conosciamo è finita nel 2030. È raro trovare un intero skyline in fiamme e subito dopo la calma per seguire un singolo verme, per sentire respirare il suolo: la quindicesima raccolta della poetessa americana ci mostra che è possibile. Con una voce che riflette sulla propria mortalità immersa in un profondo silenzio, nella memoria di un paesaggio scomparso, 2040 non può che renderci sempre più consapevoli della bellezza di questo mondo che potremmo distruggere.

Genres: Poetry

304 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2025

About the author

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Reviews

[Laura Passin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I might be a different person now that I have read this book. A different poet at least.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems are separated into three parts, plus a Coda, which acts as a conclusion or epilogue.
The third section is the most evocative, and expresses the most immediacy, but all three parts are engaging and have a lot to say about humanity. The poet expresses concepts I'd never considered: What if all music was a clarion call? And if you separate love from desire, do you have any love left? The wheels in the head of this poet have learned to turn in completely new ways.

You know to expect danger, when the first thing the poet asks of us is "Are we extinct yet?" 

The mood is ethereal, a not-there kind of here, where here is not a place, but a memory, a thread linking to a thought. A state of being without being, possibly stripped away to where only reflection remains. 

There is a feeling of vast expanse, but not filled with anything sustainable. 

None of our hyped-up focused skills make a difference when the Earth reclaims itself. There was a time before you, and there will be a time after you.

We make the mistake of thinking that we are too much, taking up too much space, too much of everything. If only we could reduce our impact, maybe . . . But, no. We fail to see that we aren't too much; we aren't enough. This is why the great erasure has begun. We will slow,  until there isn't enough left of us to keep moving.

It feels melancholy, reading about the world erasing us until we reflect the formless void, but it is also affecting, in an expansive total ruin kind of way. It is wicked literal with its breathtaking nature.

For the wise, the signs are there: when the birds go silent, all is not well. Silence reaches further than sound.

If nothing is the same, what is truth, what is real? Even time is meaningless, if it goes on long enough. Too much sameness kills time, leaving us untethered, a frightening kind of freedom, more like free fall, with nothing to hold on to, to anchor us. When nothing is left, how do you fight it?

It's funny how we talk about "the end of the world." The world won't be ending. We will.

Humanity's gains are what has starved the Earth all this time. Did we think there wouldn't be a reckoning? And now the Earth wants to call in our debt. We must pay what we owe, give back everything we've taken.

You cannot prune back disaster, or trim the edges just so. We invited the future to erase every footprint, to bury us like a sandstorm.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of these poems seek to burn you and your house down. Graham isn’t here to waste your time, but to tell you maybe you have been wasting your own. This house IS on fire and we better smell the trees and touch one another because eventually we aren’t here. If we ever were.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is (for obvious reasons hello Pulitzer) grahams best work (that I’ve read so far) and I feel this nearly required reading for all of humanity at this point.

[Travis Klunick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jorie is a god

[Brittany Mishra]

This is a beautiful collection, but I don't believe I'm in the right mind frame or mental space to love this book. Not yet anyway. It was difficult to make it through these poems. I found them strange and cluttered and disorganized, but I also understand why they are that way. This book is about death and dying and reimagining the beauty of a world during the act of dying. It is a book of appreciation and gratitude and looking at it into the future.

[Hayden Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Human heart, I say to myself, what are you doing here, this is far too much
for you to lay
eyes on.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

To Jorie Graham
(But not in her style, or any style at all)

by Philip Habecker

I thought about running
The first truly warm day after a long winter
But instead, I sat down on the porch with a beer
to read poetry
Only so many weeks in a life
Perhaps by running, I could add several extra
However, I would have added them by running,
So it's not really a net gain.

Besides: every future day looks to be truly warm
As Jorie has pointed out.
And every long winter short in comparison.

There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
Barry, we didn't forget to build the boat.
There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
We decided not to build it, but to eat our marshmallows now instead.

When have we ever believed that the world wasn't ending?
We are not waiting for the end of the world.
The world we knew has already ended.
Indeed was gone before we were born.

-Philip Habecker

Innovative poetry is often very, very difficult to understand. It's got many things going on all at the same time. Playing not just with words, but letters, ambiguity, languages, phonetics, syntax... It's too much. Authors will often see things they didn't intend in the initial write that they will come back to and edit for emphasis. Maybe it was buried in their psyche. Maybe it was a happy accident. Maybe it was a muse. Who's to say? But the more innovative, the more one has to pay attention, and the more open the poetry is for interpretation.

Take these few words:

you are not dying

(This is from Then the Rain, by the way)

Now add the next word and see how everything has changed.

you are not dying
yet,

And then - and THEN - see how it's grown and shifted once again:

you are not dying
yet, we are

This is me again - Philip - take time to think about who "you" is in this instance. "We." We are... we are what? And then:

you are not dying
yet, we are

alive

But keep going:

you are not dying
yet, we are

alive in the death
of this iteration of
earth,


It's also concerning, because with so much going on, I imagine innovative poetry will be one of the first things that will become indistinguishable from AI written material.

Reading Grahams's apocalyptic treatise, (in poetic form, of course), one might come away with the impression the narrator was (at times) a sentient AI speaking outside of time or spacetime. It was at once warning and resignation. But what can we do? The world existed before us, and will exist after us. We are not waiting for the end of the world. "The quiet before the storm is the storm." (The Quiet, p 74)

Jorie Graham reminds us that every world ends all the time. It's apocalyptic, but we're already right there hanging off the edge. "I turn to the dead more now, clearer every day as I approach them, there in their silky layers of silence, their wide almost waveless ocean, rolling under their full moon, swells striating the horizonless backdrop, extending what seems like forever in that direction—though what can forever mean where there is no space no time."

This book is William Gibson. It's Cloud Atlas in poetic form. Read fog and tell me I'm wrong. Reading this poetry is learning a different language that you learn as you go - like any language.

We've had a good run, haven't we?

Haven't we?

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't want to dream Jorie Graham's dreams. The ups and downs of roller coasters have never been fun to me. In this book, the roller coaster is perspective, from loss of consciousness to the minutia of the living, most especially from being destroyed to facing a return to the same arena that destroyed you, from giving up on a future to acknowledging that there will be renewal. Back and forth we go through this book, all--or nearly all-- in Graham's oblique mode of expression that is almost like a double impressionism. There's an impressionistic surface while at the same time there's a sense that there's some other impressionistic image just below the surface that you again can almost see just as you don't see the surface quite as clearly as you feel you should. Does that mode of expression always work for me? No, but it does here. It's like a shamanistic dream journey, something both beyond this world yet of this world. Without knowing quite what it means, the word interdimensionality comes to mind.

I was hoping to read this book in one sitting from beginning to end to get the full effect of the development of its parts. In fact I restarted it once with that hope. Alas, circumstances prevent that from being a possibility now. So I'll be keeping this book with the intention of rereading it from end to end in one sitting in the future--and simply rereading it for additional nuances. I'm sure there are many, many I missed. A simple example is her choice of text justification. Sometimes she justifies to the right and sometimes to the left. I confess I wasn't clever enough to detect a reason for the choices being made in that regard.

So who is this book for? You have to have a tolerance for things strangely said and not quite said, indirect not direct. You also have to be open-minded about what is "reality." It's what I think of as slippage, losing one's sense of quite what is being said or meant or where one is at. If you're comfortable with these things--or willing to be uncomfortable for the duration of a 91 page book, consider giving this a try.

[AGM · Rating 4 out of 5]

So beautiful. I’m never really able to get into poetry, but Jorie Graham is just absolutely magical.

[Zoee.Net84 · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Did you live. Did it feel like life to / you.”

[Andy Zhang · Rating 5 out of 5]

for now this is my favorite poetry collection of the 21st century

[Kijinyx · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m lowkey so obsessed with this book of poems. i had to first read it for my nature poetry class (which i hated) but then i was like holy shit these poems are insane. i read some of the other reviews and it seems like people generally have mixed ideas on what graham is talking about, whether it’s life or love or whatever, but i feel like it’s so clear and so important (it’s like the whole point of the book?) that this is an environmentalist commentary on the state of nature right now. it’s literally called to 2040 ffs. and yeah poetry can have multiple meanings but it’s taking away from the whole point to gloss over its core theme of human destruction of nature and the perilous effects of climate change.

i thought it was genius to make the whole book a kind of rage AGAINST order rather than FOR because it emphasizes how much poetry can only do so much. graham isn’t out here spending lines and lines of flowery language waxing poetics about the beauty of nature: it’s actually the opposite (yr for your, cld for could, etc.) with her minimalistic use of language and her meta acknowledgement of her own writing. she’s saying poetry isn’t enough. none of this is enough. we’re going to be fucked in 2040 if we don’t actually do something meaningful to change our world right now, the world we should be so grateful to be living in. it’s just. wow, what a way to write.

mostly as a reminder to myself, my favorite poems are: are we, on the last day, dusk in drought, dis-, can you, then the rain. oh my god, then the rain. it actually makes me feel almost religious it’s so like intense and almost biblical? jorie graham you’re a genius.

[Jeff]

PULITZER 2024 NOMINEE: This is one of those books that receives high praise, but I literally felt nothing reading it (perhaps because I understood nothing while reading it). For that reason, I’m not rating it.

I don’t know anything about Jorie Graham, but a quick web search shows that she is a huge figure in contemporary poetry that I’ve somehow missed out on. She was diagnosed with uterine cancer a few years ago. This collection, “To 2040,” deals with her own eventual end as well as the world’s eventual end.

I love poetry that is for the people (thinking of Carl Sandburg). I do not like poetry that is so esoteric and obtuse that someone with advanced degrees can’t make heads or tails of it.

And leaving out vowels in the word “your”? What’s the point of that?

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 3 out of 5]

In reflecting on what’s slipping away from her, Graham expresses anguish over the challenges of facing her own mortality. She also expresses despair with humankind’s imminent extinction as a result of depravity. She addresses the future in many of these poems, but most of her verses come off rambling rather than focused. Using spare prose, she tries to make sense of the disaster forthcoming on the horizon, but choppy line breaks detract from instead of enhancing her message. To 2040 is a commendable collection warning about our planet headed towards an apocalypse. I hope every rational and conscientious individual shares Graham’s concerns. However, my interest strayed because her poems often drifted as though they had lost track of their direction and were trying to write themselves back to a focused conclusion.

[Kasey Doherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoyed this collection of poetry I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure out what was going on if I hadn't read the description on the back of the book. Poetry can be hard to read so it may be a combination of me getting my English degree ten years ago and this poetry being a little inaccessible. However, there were some really poignant lines and I did enjoy the collection as a whole a lot.

Two poems that stuck out to me where "In Reality" and "The Quiet."

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite collection I’ve read in a long time. I was pretty amazed the entire time. Every poem felt as close to perfect as I’d ever hope to read. My mind is so blown, I’m so glad I read this

[Audrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.75 stars rounded up.

This had some moments, but ultimately wasn't for me. sometimes poetry finds us in the wrong moments, which is entirely possible what happened with me and this collection.

[Lisa Hiton · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of the century. One of the best books of all time and for all time—however little of it we may have left.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am writing this in code because I cannot speak or say the thing. The thing which should be, or I so wish could be plumbed fathomed disinterred from this silence…

It’s even a bit beautiful—isn’t it—this dream of being held while the light flows through us.

all was alive. You feel the suddenly. You feel like an itch a thing you used to call so casually yr inwardness, u feel yr looking at the knotting, the undoings of nothing in nothing, gorgeous—cursive golds what wld u say now, say it now, do it now yr inwardness thinks as you feel yr greed in yr eyes yr hands yr soul—


Jorie Graham gets me every time. I start out on a voyage with her books, get annoyed, hate them, wish for more clarity and understanding why this line break, this space, it makes no sense; then I am awestruck by her imagery, and realize she is writing for humanity, for the planet, and of course it is not in my native language, my dialect, my brainwashed brain. This is actually some of her most accessible poetry, and is so powerful.

To 2040
With whom am I speaking, are you one or many, what are u, are u, do I make myself clear, is this which we called speech what u use, are u a living form such as the form I inhabit now letting it speak me. My window tonight casts light onto the snow, I cast from my eye a glance, a touchless touch, tossed out to capture this shine we

cast. I pull it in, into my memory store. I have lost track. It’s snowed for more than we’d imagined at the start, it began, unexpectedly it began, it did not really cease again, it slowed some days, melted as it fell on some, days passed thru snow rather than snow thru days. Did it remember us at some point, when we cld hold no

more memory of day in mind. We had started with minutes. We had loved their fullness—cells flowing thru this body of time—purging all but their passing thru us & our letting them flow-through. But then they stopped being different. You couldn’t tell one minute from another, or an hour, day, year.
…
all was alive. You feel the suddenly. You feel like an itch a thing you used to call so casually yr inwardness, u feel yr looking at the knotting, the undoings of nothing in nothing, gorgeous—cursive golds what wld u say now, say it now, do it now yr inwardness thinks as you feel yr greed in yr eyes yr hands yr soul—
…
Look behind you, turn, look down as much as you can, notice all that disappears. Place as much as you can in your heart. It doesn’t matter what’s in your mind. When you come here all you will be left w/is a heart they spill out…
…
The words glow in their crease. The unread shines with its particular shine. It has been weighed. It was put to yr account & burned. What was it, u must remember, what was yr message, what were u meant to pass on?

I AM STILL
…
Say everything I say to the air
which begins to
thin now, say

everything before it dis-
appears. Turn us
loose. I remember
a stream darting free

from headwaters & then the

downslope which was
earth’s gift. I remember
it widening. Leaves stirring above it,
as-if leaves stirring deep in-

side its
surface. What
are they an
expression of

I think as I squint them

In-gripping before
This memory
Fades. Oh. Try to hold on.
We are a reflection

Now. Where is what we

Reflect? I look up before the
air becomes unbreathable,

I close my eyes and try to see it again,
the stream. It is a temple. It is
rushing. How could we
not have heard.

THEN THE RAIN after years of virga, after much almost & much never again, after coalescing in dry lightning & downdrafts & fire, after taking an alternate path thru history & bypassing us, after the trees, after the gardens, after the hard seeds pushed in as deep as possible & kept alive on dew,
after it all went, then, one day, out of in- terference & dis- continuity, out of in- congruity, out of collision somewhere high above our burnt lands, out of chemistry, unknowable no matter how quantifiable, out of the touching of one atom by an other, out of the accident of touch, the rain came.
as if the air turned green, as if the air were the deep in- side of the earth we can never reach where it reaches out to those constellations we have not discovered, not named, & now never will,
with my eyes full of rain, and they say hold us up, you are not dying yet, we are alive in the death of this iteration of earth, there will be another in which no creatures like us walk on this plateau of years & minutes & grasses & roads, a place where no memory can form, no memory of anything, not again,
& if you listen you can hear a faint pulse in it, a mirage, a release of seeds into the air where wind insists, & my heavy hands which rise now, palms up, shining, say to me, touch, touch it all, start with your face, put your face in us.


TRANSLATION RAIN
…
I am writing this in code because I cannot speak or say the thing. The thing which should be, or I so wish could be plumbed fathomed disinterred from this silence…

DIS-
ease came. Dis-
figurement. Dis-
enfranchisement, dis-
sembling, dis-

grace. Now
who am I
going to be I
asked. Whom does one

ask, you might
ask. Are you
still alive there,
reading these words,

is the beautiful air

still shoving its
fistfuls
into my
lungs. In-

hale says the nurse,
holding my hand.
Try again says
another voice

Try harder.
Do you remember what it is
to try. Do you

remember when u took yr
first breath. You are there
again now
says the voice

on the speaker.
…
One more time,
says the monitor,
let’s try living here
one more time—
…
I will be wild again,
I will be taken in.
Please try again
he says from the
booth. We need

you to wager
everything
on us again. We need u to
invent god like a razor

& have him slice open
all this nothingness around us,
we need to watch it
lay before us, slain.
…
it’s saying you are in history
dear child

you are only in history,

you are not in time,
& you’re not getting
out. Not yet. Not
in time. You

have to return here
right now & watch it all dis-
integrate. Find
the door

out, the hum pleads.
Out of the future I ask
trying to rise. No,
out to the future it murmurs

as hope smiles
its wry smile—
stay in touch it is
saying, stay in touch

babe. I’m here
for u. I’m always
going to be
here for you.

DAY
…Will you let me hear it? What will you hear this time it asks. What will you make of the chorus when it comes. What will you make. You had a lifetime to get this story, to write its long and bitter poem. You had thousands of hearts, one for each day which let you into its cool new body, for free, unstopped. What will you make. I saw you turn away. I watched you arrange and rearrange your minutes. Lie back down now. Be very still. I do not know if you will be entertained again. And he left then. There was no weeping, just feathers passing. And I am here now listening for day with all I’ve got. What have I got.

IN REALITY the river was still widening as it went, as it carried me, thick mists rising off it all day, was still widening, yes, for a while longer, holding the sky in its belly and back, me on my back in the small of my boat, rudder jammed, oar lost or is it I tossed it some long time ago when I imagined myself to be free… trees casting their calligraphies deeper and deeper as they try to tell the story of the bend we are now approaching someone’s unyielding idea of happiness… Everything hangs in the balance, say the looping vines the late red light begins articulating. Think about it, they scrawl, try to remember what it was you loved, try to clean up your memories in time… my right eye trying to make out what’s up ahead as the light goes gold. Isn’t it beautiful the old world says.
Represent me says the day. Quick. There’s no time to lose. Represent my shaking grasses where the wind picks up and the river narrows and the dream of forgiveness is replaced by desire.
Human heart, I say to myself, what are you doing here, this is far too much for you to lay eyes on. To whom am I singing. I have the stories we needed ready. I understand the comings and goings called grief. It is then that I see the river is ending. The water is down to a handful of jewels tossed out here and there on the miles of dry sand.
I remember the spring, the headwaters, precipitation, swell. I see again the currents begin—the sweet cut into land of channels, meanders. Remember the turns. Put my hands in the springs, the groundwater recharge. The slow delicate fanning of the drainage basin. The mouth, the confluence, the downriver arrivals— delta—sediment yield—salt tide— open sea.

CAN YOU hear yourself breathe. Can you help me. Can you hear the fly. Can you hear the tree. No I don’t mean wind, I mean the breathing of the tree through bark. Can u, say the grasses, please hear us. Can we hear u hear the tips of water on us, lithe & so heavy with light & bending lens-tips. Can u hear this e- vaporation. Can u keep blessing, keep not thinking, remind yourself of your own breathing, & what is growing—

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

AS I READ To 2040, I kept thinking of Saint-John Persse's Anabase, a book-length poem published in France in 1924 and in an English translation by T. S. Eliot (no less) in 1930.

I had not read Anabase since the 1980s and so was surprised to be reminded of it. I don't think the likenesses, such as they are, were intentional on Graham's part. Perhaps she has not even read it; Perse is not often cited these days, although he was well regarded in his own time (Nobel Prize, 1960). Still, it seemed worth thinking a bit on why the one book called up for me memories of the other.

Anabase has orientalist fantasy aspects that render it problematic for a contemporary reader, but its leading quality is that it seems set in an indefinite antiquity somewhere near Asia Minor while at the same time being shot though with the sensibility of the present (i.e., early 20th century).

It has a little of the effect of Dune or Star Wars in that some of the customs and institutions in those fantasy worlds seem drawn from historical antiquity while others involve highly futuristic technologies. The difference being, though, that the world-building in Anabase is intentionally fragmentary and incomplete, more suggestion than assertion.

Here is a short bit from the Eliot translation:


To the place called the Place of the Dry Tree:

and the starved levin allots me these provinces in the West.

But beyond are the greater leisures, and in a great

land of grass without memory, the unconfined unreckoned year, seasoned with dawns and heavenly fires. (Matutinal sacrifice of the heart of a black sheep.)


So it sounds like a modern translation of an ancient text for which the explanatory context has entirely vanished.

To 2040 sometimes has a similar atmosphere in that it is set in the future, but a denuded future, from which a lot of familiar landmarks have been effaced. An eerie, alien bareness surrounds us in To 2040 as it does in in Anabase. We are conscious of something gone: in Anabase, it is the clutter of modernity, while in To 2040, it is non-human nature.

To 2040 is something akin to The Waste Land, too, especially "What the Thunder Said" with its juxtaposition of the desert of the Gospels with the moral collapse of the First World War. In fact, the last poem in Graham's book, "Then the Rain," certainly made me think of the "Then a damp gust / bringing rain" passage in "What the Thunder Said." The unspeakable relief, the hope of that...but in Graham the coming of rain seems to be about earth gathering strength to renew itself once the last human beings have finally disappeared.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

from Translation Rain
Each word I use I have used before.
Yet it is not used, is it? It is not used up, is it? because what is in it stays
hidden. And the words
appear again as if
new. (19*)

from Fog*
Then the drone came. A small personal drone. Hung at an
intimate height. Had
much to say. Hovering,
eye to eye, lurching &
chattering. Is it your time now, I thought. Thought
it said
you should have learned to
love but came up
close, saw it was old, had been
patched thousands of
times, maybe more, was medalled with debris,
a tin castle, a wooden fish, a rattle—a plastic
clock w/one hand—piano strings w/hooks—a miniature
telephone pole—a brass
templefront & golden ladder stuck
in a tiny
well—all shaking the air—a tinny racket—
also scraps of veil—maybe tulle—seemed angry—one eye a milagro
hanging there sideways—a pair of
lungs or were those actual
air sacs & bronchial
tubes—
the red drops actual—
as if whistling or singing though we both were
silent. I have seen everything it said, though I could actually hear
nothing. (63*)

[Alissa Hattman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first line: "Are we / extinct yet" sent chills down my spine. The whole collection is like that. Read alongside the Between the Covers interview with Graham.

[Bill Shultz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate the emergent strategy that Graham utilized to warp the notion of time: A poet sitting in a kitchen of the future, writing about and from the present moment which is the future moment, reflecting on the past (our present), and deeply clinging to a poet's hopefulness about the future amidst an extinction event unfolding due to past-present inaction.

[Lindsey Z · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rhetorical situation of each poem wasn't usually clear to me, but I appreciated how Graham connects nature to her contemplations of morality and self. There was a sense of interconnectedness in her poetry, although opaque at times. Her writing style--particularly her use of enjambment, elision, and swapping/omission of punctuation--took some getting oriented to.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reader, beware, this book will change you.

"I am writing this in code because I cannot speak or say"
"Translation Rain"

"alphabets and their hiving, swarming--"

“Can you”
“hear
the tips of water on
us, lithe &
so heavy with light & bending
lends-tips.”

"You feel the suddenly. You feel like an itch a thing you used to call so
casually yr inwardness"

[Jiapei Chen · Rating 2 out of 5]

These poems conjure a past where humanity still flourished and a present that is devoid of memories, companionship, tenses, and life itself. Coda poem gives us a glimpse of a hopeful future, when the parched and desolate landscape is blessed with rain once again, giving life a second chance.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You there. Wake up. But
nobody's here,
just the earth
revolving, in-
exhaustible, without
purpose, in which
from moment to
moment
even now
change gathers,
inception gathers, & variation, & pro-
liferation
And all is. All is.
Do you remember.”

[Favian · Rating 1 out of 5]

The world must be in a heightened state of dystopia, but I had a difficult time understanding what the state of the world is. What is the American experiment that will end in 2030? What was going on between the lines?

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars