Dear Apocalypse

by K.A. Hays

K. A. Hays’ debut collection opens with an invitation to the apocalypse, an act of American bravado that soon gives way to fear of disaster, dread of violence, and grief for the dead. As the book’s “lilies and fowls”―seedlings and swifts, thrushes and pitch pines―feed and grow, they become figures for human struggle. The speaker of these poems longs for God, for a mind that outlasts the body, and for a way to live with acceptance in a world that is chaotic and uncertain. Dear Apocalypse, the reader finds in the closing sections, does not dare the world to end so much as it asks it to stay, and comes “to love / this waking life,” even with its terrors, even in the dark.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2009

About the author

K. A. (Katie) Hays is the author of four books of poems from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry (2009, 2011), Best New Poets, and many other anthologies and magazines, including The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Gray's Sporting Journal. She is also a fiction writer whose work has appeared in more than a dozen magazines, and is currently at work on a manuscript for younger readers. Hays studied literature at Bucknell and Oxford universities, and earned an M.F.A. in the Literary Arts (fiction) from Brown University in 2005. A 2018 Fellow at Vermont Studio Center, and 2011 Poet-in-Residence at the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, Hays teaches creative writing at Bucknell. She lives with her family in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with all good things that come to right minds, these poems are likely to spark a flash of jealousy. You might think (as I did), "How wasn't this book already written? And why not by me?" Get over it. Hays' poetry is resignedly hopeful in tone and inspiringly tremendous in scope. Read her work. It's an outstanding reminder of just how relevant poets can be sometimes.

[Ron Mohring · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have admired this writer's poems (and stories!) for years. Her precision, her unflinching scrutiny, her connection to the natural world, her insistence on probing life's difficult questions, and her stunning mastery of language--both its roots and its possibilities. That's a sentence fragment by intention: few of us will ever be as good as Katie Hays. An awesome debut.

[Ben Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, thoughtful poetry.

[Quincy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I, petulant and ruffled, flounder at the limits of language, Hays reminds me of the possibilities inherent in its malleability.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love so many poems in this book including "I Made My Soul a Hat"--well so many. But here is "Arrival":

On some mornings you wake
having misplaced the self's blueprint,
and you wonder, what was my role? did I complain?
who loved me and when did this body come?

And you look at the squirrels' twisting haunches,
the roofs and wiry scrolling of the tops of trees,
the wearying pocked paint on the familiar barn
like feathers ruffed and molting,
and ask, how long will they stay?

The man who sets a lawn chair in the far field
apart from the dense curl of trees come to mind;
how he has leaned through many noons,
dogless, without binoculars, without excuse

for choosing this place, a clash with the vacant plain
and still as slate. As you would join the squirrels
this morning, or be that soon storm-stripped paint,
wherever it goes, consider: what if we're granted glimpses

of the things we might, with work, become?
Let the man sit. Let him be unexplained.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I am being unfair giving this collection only three stars. The language is beautiful, rhythmic... It is obvious that great work and great love went into the craft of this volume.

But I simply didn't connect with most of the pieces. Nothing really took off the top of my head.

I feel like this is a group of poems I will have to reread in the future. I may feel differently about it then.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely first book. Lots of interesting syntax, Roethke-style descriptions of plants, and quietly haunting epiphanies. I also loved the book's organization. Some of my favorites: "Letter from the Afternoon," "The Way of All the Earth," "Darkling," "Exodus," "This Must Be How Monks Felt on their way," "I'd say God," etc. I will be rereading this soon.

[Emma Bolden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one helluva book of poems. And they're double-spaced! And it works!

[Jude Brigley · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are very accomplished, dark and brave. The poet looks with an eye that does not turn away.