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Soft Apocalypse
Soft Apocalypse pirouettes in the "anemic glow" of late capitalism, its lyrics performing in the civic pocket, in the offbeat, and by arrhythmias that offer improvisational measures for going and going on. Chrome angels, strange beloveds, and cool-eyed speakers cut speculative lines through precarious spaces of the present--deserts and nightscapes, neon-lit strips, corner stores, foreclosures, pharmacy queues, and "crumpled back alleys"--making imaginative economies, queer kinships, and alternative ways of being in the world. Nothing here is done with ease, but irreducible gifts do slip surreptitiously from palm to palm: after all, "we all need a little help sometimes / baby." Anybody in these poems may use ordinary, embodied matters--"raw materials" and "dream residuals"--to shimmy out of dire, official measures and into "an unmarked rest," an excess, or any "o vacancy!" where unofficial
exchanges may be made.
Soft Apocalypse insistently edges these minor events and intimate apprehensions against the official orders, projections, violations, and isolations of our time. Instead of calculating toward a dystopic ending, this book bets on its softer wrecks, a futurity in an intimately rewired collective.
exchanges may be made.
Soft Apocalypse insistently edges these minor events and intimate apprehensions against the official orders, projections, violations, and isolations of our time. Instead of calculating toward a dystopic ending, this book bets on its softer wrecks, a futurity in an intimately rewired collective.
- GenresPoetry
106 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2023
31 people want to read
About the author
Leah Nieboer
2 books62 followersLeah Nieboer grew up in rural Iowa. She is a poet, Deep Listener, graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and recent PhD graduate in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her first collection of poetry, SOFT APOCALYPSE (UGA Press 2023), was selected by Andrew Zawacki for the 2021 Georgia Poetry Prize, a nationally recognized series, and was featured as one of the top ten debut collections of 2023 by Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Mountain West Writers’ Contest in Poetry, and the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Denver, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts at Mt. San Angelo and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in mercury firs, the Brooklyn Rail, Oversound, Western Humanities Review, Poetry Daily, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver, where she writes, teaches, and co-hosts The Ritter, a new arts & culture podcast.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 6, 2024
In the mid-2000s, I remember liking this YouTuber, LisaNova, who had this string of fun skit videos. And then one day she posted a montage where she was on a city street, bright lights saturating out of all the shops, emphasized by shifty movements, like what happens in a montage. Then the camera would come to her face for a moment before returning to the city. New Order was in the background. It felt euphoric and a little sad at the same time. And I was obsessed with that feeling. How in middle of a video like that I wished it would just keep going for twenty or thirty minutes. I wished it would sustain that feeling in me.
That’s what Nieboer’s book does. Like Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets, Nieboer does this thing with the fragment that is indeed soft, like a feathering or a gelled shift from one fragment to the next. Which sustains this tone that feels ending-ish, or it feels like the poet is in the middle of ending her ending (in that Gertrude Stein kind of ongoing syntax). Maybe she’s just walking along the Las Vegas strip. Or maybe she’s in a pedestrian part of a medium-sized Midwestern city. Like Short North in Columbus, OH. Or the U. City Loop in St. Louis. Somewhere that’s interesting and “interesting” at the same time. A place that can preoccupy the poet with a series of visual impressions while she’s walking through. With well-lit window displays, and enough people around that everyone is occupied with their own world.
Or at least that pedestrian district is the vibe. Even when the book slides to darker locales, it maintains for me a sense of public access. Like Nieboer has shifted to more private situations, more inside a friend’s or a lover’s living room, or maybe the two are in the bedroom but you feel like the living room is where their heads are at. I don’t know. It’s hard describing the combination of public-ish setting and private perspective on life. Making the poem feel a little like a public performance of someone thinking. Like it’s the poet inside her own head reckoning with a series of visual impressions, and the impressions feel like a cocoon. What she sees right now. What she could imagine seeing. An outward looking as a long sustained private moment, cognizant of what binds the visual to thought as an activity. And even as the poems place the poet in private spaces, as well as the public ones, it’s all about being present, or presence as a general vibe that you're looking back on with fondness. And by “presence” I mean the one radiating into a subject. Or the poet, her frame of mind, her existential-ness, her self as it absorbs the world around her. Like the poems are syntheses of affect and the subjective, so they can’t be entirely consumed by that subjective introspection. Whatever it is that builds affect in literature, for Nieboer, that’s washing through all her subjectivity.
That’s what Nieboer’s book does. Like Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets, Nieboer does this thing with the fragment that is indeed soft, like a feathering or a gelled shift from one fragment to the next. Which sustains this tone that feels ending-ish, or it feels like the poet is in the middle of ending her ending (in that Gertrude Stein kind of ongoing syntax). Maybe she’s just walking along the Las Vegas strip. Or maybe she’s in a pedestrian part of a medium-sized Midwestern city. Like Short North in Columbus, OH. Or the U. City Loop in St. Louis. Somewhere that’s interesting and “interesting” at the same time. A place that can preoccupy the poet with a series of visual impressions while she’s walking through. With well-lit window displays, and enough people around that everyone is occupied with their own world.
Or at least that pedestrian district is the vibe. Even when the book slides to darker locales, it maintains for me a sense of public access. Like Nieboer has shifted to more private situations, more inside a friend’s or a lover’s living room, or maybe the two are in the bedroom but you feel like the living room is where their heads are at. I don’t know. It’s hard describing the combination of public-ish setting and private perspective on life. Making the poem feel a little like a public performance of someone thinking. Like it’s the poet inside her own head reckoning with a series of visual impressions, and the impressions feel like a cocoon. What she sees right now. What she could imagine seeing. An outward looking as a long sustained private moment, cognizant of what binds the visual to thought as an activity. And even as the poems place the poet in private spaces, as well as the public ones, it’s all about being present, or presence as a general vibe that you're looking back on with fondness. And by “presence” I mean the one radiating into a subject. Or the poet, her frame of mind, her existential-ness, her self as it absorbs the world around her. Like the poems are syntheses of affect and the subjective, so they can’t be entirely consumed by that subjective introspection. Whatever it is that builds affect in literature, for Nieboer, that’s washing through all her subjectivity.
Displaying 1 of 1 review