Futurepanic

by Amish Trivedi

Sweeping and subversive and anxious and heartfelt, FuturePanic by Amish Trivedi is a Four Quartets for the Millennial set. Infused with the nervous energies of the past half decade, when living with macro-tragedy and dread have become more ingrained in day-to-day functioning than ever, Trivedi's third book of poetry employs a deliberate and plaintive lyric mode across five unfolding sections to wrestle with how much of the psyche one can let untether before the self faces annihilation. The poet confronts the gathering terrors that creep forth from simultaneously pondering vast, heady concepts like time and futurity in conjunction with more localized, proximate concerns like whether one will face the looming specter of a mass shooting the next time one goes to a box store, concert, movie theater, grocery store, school, or other public space. In FuturePanic, Trivedi questions whether the collective grief and guilt of our shared transgressions and fears are all-consuming or if we can use humanity's boundless potential for creativity to rouse an alternative we've never known enough of to embrace fully—a moment's peace.

116 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2021

About the author

Amish Trivedi is the author of Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed (Shearsman, 2019), Sound/Chest (Coven Press, 2015) and a few chapbooks- What We Remembered Before the Fire (above/ground, 2018) most recently. Poems are in Kenyon Online, New American Writing, Typo, and other places. He has reviewed music for The Rumpus and poetry for Sink Review and Jacket2. He has an M.F.A. from Brown and is at work on a Ph.D. at Illinois State University.

Reviews

[Leonard Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book and their first book, which is called Sound/Chest and I think they might be genuinely one of the most interesting poets publishing today. I don't see them popping up anywhere, which tells me my read is correct and that they are too outside of the mainstream of neo-liberal, institutional poets to get any traction. But what they are doing in this book is really where I think poetry should have gone instead of falling in love with social media, which is to lean into the philosophy angle that makes poetry such a great art form. This is not a book of precious moments or easily quotable passages but rather a book about obession. I what brought me in was the reference to Eliot by the publisher. Four Quartets is Eliot's best work, so to see a poet compared to that particular set of poems is immediately curious. And I don't think this person disappoints at all. This is a work of such strange brilliance that I think more people need to be reading them. Or maybe not.

Apologies. I do not know who they are to know their pronouns. if I am wrong, I am sorry.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5 stars
I really enjoyed this poetry book. I found the speaker to be very refreshing and honest. There were so many lines in this book that just were amazing.