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The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That
Nick Lantz
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Series Editors
Ronald Wallace, Founding Series Editor
Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry
“From the brilliant mind of Nick Lantz, this expansive collection thrives in dissonance, pinging from politics, climate, the pandemic, and cancer to pop culture and the small banalities of daily life in America. Both scathing and tender, always surprising, these poems ripped my heart out.”
—Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head
The windshield crack starts / small, the size of a metaphor
A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author’s cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism. “Is that something I should put in a poem?” asks Nick Lantz; the resounding answer is yes!
Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz’s collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection, a series of poems that brilliantly capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse. Depicting the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending, this volume reminds us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives.
Life is all gilded frescoes
and Arnold Palmers
at the clubhouse until Titus and his men
pass through with torches,
until Cortés and his men
pass through with torches, until Sherman
and his men and so on,
until men forget
what their hands looked like without torches.
—Excerpt from “Ruin”
Nick Lantz is the author of four previous books of poetry, including You, Beast (winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry) and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House (winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry). His poems have appeared in many journals as well as in the Best American Poetry anthology and his awards include the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lantz teaches in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, Texas, with his wife and cats
Author's Website - www.nick-lantz.com
Praise
“Lantz’s poems struggle compellingly with the complicity and compartmentalizing of twenty-first-century middle-class American life. The paradox of cancer treatment—injecting poison to keep the patient alive—is a moving analog for this malaise: how much toxicity can we survive? Yet there is a profound tenderness throughout that refuses despair—this is what makes Lantz a brilliant poet of the Anthropocene.”
—Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes
“Lantz breaks lines the way life falls out from under us and drops us into a new obsession, heartbreak, diagnosis, or news cycle. Testicular cancer. The blight of an NRA convention. The choreography of politicians spinning misery into a few poll percentage points. A new Word of the Day, a meditation on which acts as an analog to an Anglo-Saxon riddle. I won’t temper my admiration (or my genial jealousy) for Lantz’s work, so let me tell you: I cannot stop thinking about this book and, perhaps more importantly, I can’t stop feeling it.”
—Emilia Phillips, author of Embouchure
“If you’re looking for momentum, for skillful swerve and riff that holds substance, Nick Lantz delivers.”
—Literary Hub
Resources
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The cover image for this book includes an AI-generated illustration created using Midjourney with manual revisions by the graphic designer, Jeremy John Parker.
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Table of Contents
Contents
1
Ruin
Poem on a Photo of a Reflection of a Bowl of Plastic Fruit
A Bow, a Basket, a Cloud
Poem Not Ending with a Phone Call
The Rabbit
Poem Not Ending with a Gesture
After Aeschylus
Poem Not Ending with U.S. Border Agents Tear-Gassing Migrant Children
I Feel Like a Million $
Poem Not Ending with Francisco Vázquez de Coronado
The Three Types of Knowledge
Poem Not Ending in a Shrug
2
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
Word of the Day
3
Postoperative
Poem Not Ending with the President’s Hands Upturned in an Expression of Unfathomable Indifference
Poem Not Ending with Anesthesia
Ode to the Dead of Bowling Green
A Cloud Weighs over a Million Pounds
Poem Not Ending with My Grandfather’s Will
Photograph of My Wife Shaving My Head
Mise en Abyme
The Survivorship
“Terrific,” “Tremendous,” “Loser,” “Tough,” “Smart,” “Weak,” “Dangerous,” “Great,” “Stupid,” “Classy,” “Big,” “Huge,” “Amazing,” “Lightweight,” “Win,” “Bad,” “Crooked,” “Moron,” “We,” “They,” “Zero”
My Father, Singing
Poem Not Ending with a Transcript of the Final Voicemails of 9/11 Victims
An Urn for Ashes
Acknowledgments
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