The poems in this volume form a constellation of dream images collected on a modern-day shaman's journey. They hang together not by logic or narrative or theme but through the unseen and irresistible forces of the heart. Apocalyptic Clichés is an x-ray of a world gone wrong and a road map to somewhere else. It is a votive candle flickering in the darkness of tribulation. It demonstrates that real poetry is a work of the spirit, a make-ing, rather than facile emotionalism or narcissistic megalomania. Several of the poems in this collection have been published in literary journals and are reprinted here with permission. All images embedded in the work are AI generated. T Abbot Collins has published several poems in small literary journals since 2011. Apocalyptic Clichés is his first collection and was composed circa 2001-2006. He will be releasing several more collections of poems soon and has begun work on a novel. Visionary poetry for the 21st century, T Abbott Collins' work is inspired by the avant-garde poetic traditions of England, Western Europe, and the Americas of the19th and 20th centuries. His poetry draws from several schools of this period: symbolism, surrealism, imagism, futurism, and more generally, modernism writ large. Like William Blake and Allen Ginsberg before him - and who alternately serve as his Virgil - Collins' deliberately places his work in dialogue with the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition and considers beauty to be possible only where the human conscience is rigorously foregrounded. Tim, as known by family and friends, released an experimental rap album under the moniker looCcaM in 2023. He has also published scholarly articles on metaphor and sound in poetry, and more specifically on the work of Chaucer, Poe, Wu-Tang Clan, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Lacan. He worked for several years as an adjunct instructor and has been working as an unwaged researcher and poet since 1999.
