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by Leah Nieboer (Author), Andrew Zawacki (Selected by)
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.Author Biography
LEAH NIEBOER grew up in Iowa. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Denver, a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the winner of the 2022 Mountain West Writers' Contest in Poetry, and the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Poetry Daily, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Ghost Proposal, and other publications. She lives in Denver and is at work on her first novel.
