Staying Alive

by Laura Sims

Poetry. In her fourth poetry collection, STAYING ALIVE, Laura Sims envisions the state of the world and of human existence before, during and after the forever-imminent apocalypse. In channeling and sampling works of apocalyptic fiction and non- fiction The War of the Worlds, The World Without Us, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and The Road, to name a few the poems explore multiple world-endings and their possible outcomes, and pose answers to the questions: will we, how do we, and should we stay alive?"

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2016

About the author

Laura Sims’s third novel, THE MAN, is due out from Putnam in July of 2026. Her novels HOW CAN I HELP YOU (2023) and LOOKER (2019) have been on Best Books lists in The New York Times, Vogue, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Publishers Weekly, and more. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Lit Hub, and Electric Lit. She lives in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a children’s librarian.

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My headed responded to a dizzying gray something or other but something+other as total and empathetic.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The present sheared
Asunder from its parent cliffs and all the past was just
The sound of metal
Warming
At the edge of space
At dawn. Every blasted city
Stilled—

The light! It came from underneath—inside the earth—
And shining upward, through
The rocks, the ground, and everything”
—
“A prolonged ululation: pantry vessels
Ring and shift as the social body

Is

Gutted, slashed
And gutted”
—
“The earth became a sea that rocked our house and power

Fled the grid and pummeled
Into me

The red glow from the East the burning docks

A boat with no one on it brought
A startling, sharp joy: behold
The searchlights'

Lustrous

Fugitive

Humanity”
—
“Astonishment
Turned
Into something

Wet leather

Where men
Had stood for a moment, a moment ago”
—
“This little world: the smell
Of dead meat, and the giant
Machines

[Suddenly, all of it seemed like a dream. I flung myself
Underwater and heard

A man
Who sounded
Like a siren]”
—
“We gave our meat to the meat plant
& the garden, town, village
Lifted from the mind
*
From above we saw:
A ruined shape
We turned to [colorless]
The sea was like the sky a long,

Long chain that tethered everything”
—
“The mind burns
Time. The mind
Burns time and its bygones

Look

I am semblance
Of life I am

Shaped like a rock like dirt vegetation and urban debris
*
The great machines
Make greater machines
And so on”
—
“The eye must follow
The polestar, bright
Out of twilight. It seems to rise, to move

From side to side, to sink. The sky

It keeps receding. Now the world is soaked
Remote

You have a pebble in your mouth. One day you may find
Yourself alone on such a raft”
—
“You were always a murmurous forest
But now you are
This

Incandescence

This slim
Conflagration

As long as
Your body
As brief as your body, it

Sputters
And gasps until

Oil runs over the bones”

[Taylor Napolsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Event and landscape are captured in this impassioned project. While nothing is quite spelled out plainly, the intensity of the images and scenarios described is powerful. I also really appreciate the afterword, where Sims talks about Cormac McCarthy and how one of his novels informed this work.

[Allison Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dunno man, not sure if I was just not in the mood for something like this (apocalyptic poetry) when I read it but my favorite part of the whole thing was the authors afterword.