How Long Has This Apocalypse Been Going On by Laura Z. Fairgrieve

Laura Fairgrieve’s poetry is a pleasure and a marvel. At times blunt and confrontational, at times allusive and delirious, this brilliant debut proposes that pandemic is both apocalypse and surreal thought experiment. Fairgrieve reminds us that we have always lived in a house of apocalypse where “we spell border like murder” where “survival slides down [our] throat like the cold yolk of an egg. And yet we have always dreamt and invented our way to love.

–Judith Baumel, Professor Emerita and Founding Director of Creative Writing at Adelphi University, and author of Thorny

Laura Fairgrieve’s How Long Has This Apocalypse Been Going On grapples with our world besieged by a global pandemic, the climate catastrophe, inhumane immigration policies, and ubiquitous war. Everything teeters on the cusp of annihilation and nightmare in these surreal poems. Roads are “paved with wasps and / bricked with forgettings.” Butterflies appear drunk, hands become “whispers of smoke,” and war drones leap “upwards / like bats from a cave.” Even the domestic space—our most sacred space of security and warmth—is threatened, becoming by turns an inadequate fortress and a suffocating, inescapable prison. Fairgrieve flashes a formidable imagination, and her visionary poems sing like dark, elegiac lullabies for our unprecedented times.

–Brian Barker, author of Vanishing Acts