61 pages
Published 2022
Read February 25
Rating: 4 out of 5
Like Avra Margariti, Tiffany Morris is one of the current luminaries of speculative poetry. I’ve seen this collection widely praised across small-press and SFF Twitter, and have been looking forward to it for a while.
These poems pull us into the gristle of the Anthropocene, sharp with bloodied antlers and crushed violets. Highways are lined with the mausoleums of apocalyptic capitalism. Golden guillotines do their necessary work; coins dropped into rivers cut as deeply as any blade. Vultures regurgitate the livers of lovers, wildflowers twist free from the ashes of golf courses. Rot is a sacrament. Colonialism and capitalism, brutal predators wearing the same skin, decay into microplastics beneath cycles of burning and renewal, consumption and birth, ghosts and afterbirth. While the current order is doomed to fail in its own rapacious excess, the future is no sanctuary:
It isn’t [safe] here. Or there.
Back away [slowly].
(From “This Is Where There Is Nothing.”)
This collection is every bit as stunning as promised.
A running list of particular favorites:
“We Are Born Devouring”
“Re-Wilding Under Those Conditions”
“Flag Burning Against Storming Sky”
“Ossuary Aria”
“If, Then”
“Cigarette Reliquary”
“Here, Have Some Ghost Stories” (easily one of my favorite poems of all time)
“Synonyms for Collapse”
“In Strange Gardens”
“Shutdown”
“In Death the House is Everywhere”
“How Softly The Earth Swallowed Us”
“Exhale // Exeunt”
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