Author Description

"SOFT APOCALYPSE pirouettes in the "anemic glow" of late capitalism and its induced chronicities, its lyrics performing in the civic pocket, in the offbeat, and by arrhythmias that offer an improvisational measure for going and going on. Its speakers enact imaginative economies, queer kinships, and experimental ways of being in the world-a world that draws its parameters unofficially, by the underside of the city, in its nightscapes, back alleys, sex shops, honkytonks, corner stores, and pharmacy queues. Any body in these poems may shimmy out of the "official measure" and escape into the dream, the "zerostream," the unmarked rest, the ultraviolet light, the "o vacancy!" and into the resistant intimacies that may be discovered there. In its sequence of long, polyvocal lyrics and cool-eyed prose poems, SOFT APOCALYPSE insistently edges this syncopated evidence against the real silences, abstractions, isolations, and detachments of the the Capitalocene and the Clincalocene. Instead of calculating toward a dystopic ending, this book bets on its softer wrecks, a futurity in an intimately rewired collective. I wrote this book for my friends, the dreamers, the queers, the underdogs, the end-of-the-month hustlers, the solitary renter with too-thin apartment walls, the chronically ill person still (always) standing in line at the pharmacy, the insomniac, the service worker and minimum-wage laborer, the person with a big grief in their heart, and anybody out there looking for a pinch of relief, or a little kindness (even from a stranger) to get by. I also wrote it in a literal and metaphorical desert; it's my best effort, in language, to make some possible spaces for being and being-with others, in spite of everything that was (and is) going on"--