The End of Everything and Everything That Comes After That

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, a series of poems that brilliantly capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse. Depicting the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending, this volume reminds 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 Corts 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"