The Walk of Absence

The apocalypse has already occurred, and we missed it. God is not dead, as Nietzsche or Mahfouz claimed, but he has simply left, as Samuel Beckett shows us. Man now lingers out of inertia, suspended indefinitely in a kind of purgatory between an abandoned heaven and a lukewarm hell-as always, but with no intention of bringing the journey to an end. Is poetry possible in the aftermath of this anticlimactic apocalypse? How to raise the stakes when there is nothing to lose? Can we devise better and more reckless games, now that the director has abandoned the show and the theatre is burned down? Perhaps the post-apocalyptic human will prove even more resilient than his predecessor, precisely because he lacks the will to live or die. And so, many of these poems were written with those in mind whom we did not lose to war, but to indifference, those that were taken not by death, but by the tepid current of everyday life... In this book of dark verse. Nostalgia, Loss, and Ruin decay in the sweet stink of Love . . . - E. Elias Merhige "Precise in its effort to provide readers with nothing less than a grid reference map of nowhere, each (poetic) line pointing back to the work's auto-poetics of absenteeism, this essential collection performs what the ground often does when kicked up by the desolate gusts of a beautiful, insouciant wind." - Liesl Ketum, Humbert Divinity School