The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That

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. He has won several awards, including 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.

1Ruin 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 VAzquez 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

"Is that something I should put in a poem?" asks Nick Lantz in The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That. The resounding answer is yes! 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. 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. All titled "Word of the Day," these poems capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse. "You can't carry water in a sentence," says the author-but after reading this collection it just might seem possible. These poems depict the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending and remind 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 CortEs 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"