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A linked sequence of poems forms the book's backbone, with an oracular voice from the future heralding the return–or hoped for return–of common animals. Part lyrical odes, part creation myths, part excerpts from a bizarre guide for naturalists, these poems mix fact and fiction, science and fable to create an unsettling vision of a dystopian world stricken by extinction, one where the world's last catfish sleeps "in the shadow of a hydroelectric dam." The imaginative language and bizarre stories of these poems are perfectly suited to capture a world that no longer makes sense: a man who wears a toupee to hide an injury inflicted by secret police, a group of villagers who make a bad bargain with a land agent.
The poems in Vanishing Acts straddle the comic and the tragic. They are by turns funny and haunting and ripe with scathing satire. They draw on the genres of speculative and science fiction as much as poetic traditions, and speak to the precarious state of man and the natural world in the twenty-first century.
Pages | 72 |
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Dimensions | 229 x 152 x 10 |
Date Published | 30 Mar 2019 |
Publisher | Southern Illinois University Press |
Series | Crab Orchard Series in Poetry |
Subject/s | Poetry by individual poets   |