“Worlds I Didn’t Hear” by Brian Hugenbruch

I want to call this a meditation on disability at the point of civilization collapse, but I also don’t feel that is an entirely accurate description. In some ways, this poem is so simple: a person with hearing aids doesn’t hear the whole end of the world–although he does hear parts of it–and finds himself back at thoughts we’ve all had: “Am I worthy?” It’s a lovely poem.

“Battle Verses of Prufrock J. Alfred” by Rachel Rodman

I like response poems a lot. I teach a class on “poetry as conversation” and we cover “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” Rodman’s poem falls into that same family of poems, taking the end of T. S. Eliot’s”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and telling the mermaid’s side of the story. It’s a great idea. I do think it’s about twice as long as it needed to be, though. The bit about Parliament didn’t seem to add anything that couldn’t be covered by their final rampage through the city, for example.

“morphology” by Jennifer Mace

Creeping, ominous, and riding the thine line between earthly and otherworldly in the way all fungus has become expert at. I feel that I know this experience, that we all know it, but it seems that Mace has exposed this secret in a way only poetry can expose things. Beautifully written.

“waning, waning” by Marisca Pichette

Not my cup of tea–pardon the pun. The image that grounds the poem is pretty, but I felt it lacked substance. As a commentary on the fleeting nature of beautiful moments, it’s not ineffective.

“A War of Words” by Marie Brennan

With a background in linguistics, I appreciate that this poem tackles language loss. It’s an important issue to me. As a poem, though, I think it falls flat. No, it crumbles; it crumbles in the way that languages crumble, and that’s beautiful but it’s also powerless. I’m not sure what the aim of this poem is; it’s not trying to motivate action or create change, and it’s not really telling a story. This one just really didn’t work for me.

“[time wrinkles]” by Emily O Liu

This one took multiple readings for me to feel like I was even close to having thoughts and feelings on it. That’s not a bad thing; poetry is like that sometimes. Something about this poem read as incredibly raw. I remember my son’s birth, being “hungry for the end” that would also be his first moment out in the world. The violence twined around that breaks my heart, though. It’s hard to even give this one a star rating because it’s not ultimately about being good poetry, it’s about expressing complex and painful inner turmoil.

“Aubade from the After Days” by Mary Soon Lee

Another poem that just didn’t land for me. The underlying ideas (the collapse of human society and that the rest of the world will keep on without us) are worthy of reflection, but there is nothing really new here. I also felt that the last stanza was somewhat clumsy. This one is not great.

“She Remains” by Jan Cronos

What an opening. All of my wishes and all of my fears about what comes after we die are acutely described here. It’s beautiful and deeply distressing. Excuse me while I reflect on my inevitable disintegration; go read this poem or something while I’m in my fugue.

“Veiling the Statues” by Raven Jakubowski

There is some really unique worldbuilding happening with the “malevolent gazes” that reminds me of The Pallid Mask of Chambers’ The King in Yellow. There is a curious intersection between that and a zombie apocalypse lurking in the background, and the apparent change of the narrator by the end of the poem is unsettling, to be sure. For me, though, the smaller moments didn’t land. There were so many examples of faces being made unseeable, but I didn’t feel that they moved the poem forward.

“Inheritance” by Elis Montgomery

I quite liked this poem. It’s about the nature of existence and the ability to feel, as structured in programmatic coding. The nesting made me linger with it, because those units of feeling and thought can be read from the smallest point outward, too.