Nieboer, Leah: Soft Apocalypse

University of Georgia Press, paperback Publication Date: March 15, 2023 Publisher Marketing: Soft Apocalypse pirouettes in the "anemic glow" of late capitalism, its prose poems and lyrics performing in the civic pocket, in the offbeat, and by arrhythmias that offer improvisational measures for going on. Chrome angels, strange beloveds, and cool-eyed speakers cut speculative lines through precarious spaces of the present--deserts and nightscapes, neon-lit strips, corner stores, foreclosures, pharmacy queues, and "crumpled back alleys"--making imaginative economies, queer kinships, and alternative ways of being in the world. Nothing here is done with ease, but irreducible gifts do slip surreptitiously from palm to palm: after all, "we all need a little help sometimes / baby." Soft Apocalypse insistently edges these unofficial exchanges and intimate apprehensions against the official orders, projections, violations, and isolations of our time. Instead of calculating toward a dystopic endi