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“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.
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.
Life is all gilded frescoes
and Arnold Palmers
at the clubhouse until Titus and his men
pass through with torches,
until CortÉs and his men
pass through with torches, until Sherman
and his men and so on,
until men forget
what their hands looked like without torches.
—Excerpt from “Ruin”
