The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That
6th March 2024
Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz’s collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection. All titled “Word of the Day,” these poems capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse. “You can't carry water in a sentence,” says the author—but after reading this collection it just might seem possible. These poems depict the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending and remind us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives. The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That is published by University of Wisconsin Press. Apply code BLOG20 at checkout for 20% off this title.%20The%20End%20of%20Everything%20and%20Everything%20That%20Comes%20after%20That.jpg)
“From the brilliant mind of Nick Lantz, this expansive collection thrives in dissonance, pinging from politics, climate, the pandemic, and cancer to pop culture and the small banalities of daily life in America. Both scathing and tender, always surprising, these poems ripped my heart out.” - Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head
“Is that something I should put in a poem?” asks Nick Lantz in The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That. The resounding answer is yes! A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author’s cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism.