Book cover for Extinction Song by John James

Extinction Song

2026 Released
35 Pages
1 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
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Tupelo PressISBN 9781961209558
A collection that combines fixed poetic forms with long-form meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene.

Extinction Song begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive to the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.

John James

John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prizeand published in the United States by Milkweed Editions. His poems appear in Boston Review, KenyonReview, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is pursuing a PhD inEnglish at the University of California, Berkeley.

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