The End of Everything and Everything That Comes After That

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"


Author: Nick Lantz
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 03/19/2024
Pages: 116
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780299347949

About the Author
Nick Lantz is the author of four previous books of poetry, including You, Beast and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House. His poems have appeared 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.