Life in the Holocene Extinction by Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Kristin Berkey-Abbott‘s Life in the Holocene Extinction is a delightful hybrid of science and mythology, with personas that illustrate and illuminate stories with references from everything from T.S. Eliot to the Bible to Nancy Drew. Intelligent and entertaining.

–Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess

She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter In this collection, an aged Nancy Drew remembers her beloved in a hospital bed; a nameless narrator encodes secret prayer appointments in her calendar; a cancer patient contemplates the cells which will kill her; and “monks get their morning / news from the psalms.” This chapbook is a church with a drive-through. On your way home from a too-long day at work or the hospital visit you never wanted to make, open these pages-encounter the sacred-and find comfort. I did.

–Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, author of 70 faces: Torah poems, Waiting to Unfold, and Open My Lips

How would Cassandra and Nancy Drew fit in the 21st century? Very well, it would seem from this inimitable collection of poems that horrify and comfort in the same graceful movement. Berkey-Abbott’s unique post-apocalyptic vision is stitched with hope and uncompromising faith. These poems offer glimpses of worlds that are as timeless as they are recognizable. At the same time, the recognizable world is presented through a sieve that connects the trivial and the ordinary, with the mythic and the cosmic. We are made aware of a world that is fast disappearing around us, while a new world peeks from the horizon, a world that is at once unimaginable and familiar. These poems offer a veritable smorgasbord of experiences, events, conflicts and routines that define our world in this millennium.

–Shefali Shah Choksi, author of Frontier Literature