EBOOK
About
Soft Apocalypse pirouettes in the "anemic glow" of late capitalism, its prose poems and lyrics performing in the civic pocket, in the offbeat, and by arrhythmias that offer improvisational measures for 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."
Soft Apocalypse insistently edges these unofficial exchanges 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.
Soft Apocalypse insistently edges these unofficial exchanges 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.
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Reviews
"Dancing inside 'the discoed light' of our late, lurid century, Leah Nieboer adroitly imbricates the private and political, minor events with macro catastrophe. At once ascetic and raptured by excess, Soft Apocalypse auditions social, civic, and erotic relationships that aspire to redress the alienations inflicted by capitalism. Set somewhere between Oklahoma and Ophiuchus, this 'triple-X rock ope
Andrew Zawacki
"In Soft Apocalypse we find 'cold little gasps of misinformation;' we find 'mismatched confessionals.' In Leah Nieboer's spirited poetry, we discover a kaleidoscopic interpretation of the real, an unending disruption to thought constantly turning where anything is possible so that nothing is impossible. It's a bumpy ride and necessarily so."
Peter Gizzi
"As a poet, process and effort are endlessly engaging for the impossibility we encounter-the task, that is, of writing what it is to be. I don't know how she did it, really, but Leah Nieboer's Soft Apocalypse makes distance intimate. Hers is a world simultaneously made and unmade, rendered in dimensions unimaginable. I find I do not want to leave. All around 'language allowing little detours.
Sally Keith
Extended Details
- SeriesGeorgia Poetry Prize