Notes on the End of the World

Poetry. NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD is a quiet apocalypse. You won't find huge explosions or sudden extinctions in Meghan Privitello's poems. Here, the days are marked instead by quiet disappearances, abandoned objects, details that might be otherwise overlooked. Objects double as warning signs: "The asbestos siding is a hologram in the leftover sun. / At once, it is a dollhouse made of bones." Animals speak in prophetic visions: "In the dead cells of her skin, / I have found your family. / There is an outline of a great tree. / They are all there—roped / around their necks, hanging."

These poems hold a microscope to life's mundane details, but they are also poems of agency—when the apocalypse comes, what use is a "good life?" When the apocalypse comes, Privitello asks us to be honest, unflinching. With each passing day, NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD gets louder and quieter, lonelier and lovelier. The end of the world does not look so different from an ordinary day, so pay attention. In the end, Privitello's poems leave room for regret and the hope of redemption—but not much.

"There is no lack of beauty and strangeness in Meghan Privitello's NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD, uncovering museums of dust, shadows, animals, ghosts—the Days of this book are filled with lush vocabulary and witchy diction. I feel totally awake and mystical in their presence."—Bianca Stone

"You were mistaken when you thought you were picking up a book of poems & not a new strange knife. In NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD, Meghan Privitello preserves & perverts & exploits a landscape where time is most pronounced by its breakages & bizarreness. This collection of post- pastoral, post-apocalyptic, post- romantic poems scream & salve & sour, all at once. The days accrue like rust on an old lover's teeth. At once deeply unsettling & recentering, this collection pleasures & unpleasures, it places the blade in your hand & begs you to slice open an apple or plunge it into your own heart."—sam sax

"Amanda Nadelberg, Vasko Popa, and David Lynch had a poetry baby. It is Meghan Privitello. CD Wright is this baby's lyric godmother. It is astonishing how one poet can be so tender while being so endlessly able to make abjection and death—the triumph of the human spirit is so clearly off the table- into art. This voice sings a contemporary and frightening love song about obliteration, self and otherwise."—Cynthia Arrieu-King

Meghan Privitello is the author of A NEW LANGUAGE FOR FALLING OUT OF LOVE (YesYes Books, 2015). Poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, Boston Review, A Public Space, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2014 NJ State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her chapbook, NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in fall 2016.