That Which Comes After - Alexis Pope
That Which Comes After - Alexis Pope
I AM HERE WITH YOU & YOU ARE TOO QUIET TO IGNORE
114 Pages
5.8 x 8.3
ISBN: 978-1-941985-43-4
Publication Date: May 8th, 2018
Like a geyser that has been reticent for far too long, Alexis Pope's That Which Comes After erupts. These urgent & irreverent poems about motherhood, depression, anxiety, and status updates weave together to form one grandiose Mediation on growing into adulthood in the midst of a toxic relationship. In the vein of Eileen Myles and Anne Carson, That Which Comes After is a book that changes books, pointing us towards the immense immediacy of torment, of tenderness, and—ultimately—of rebirth.
“The voice of her generation”
PRAISE FOR THAT WHICH COMES AFTER
“Pope’s great strength throughout is her surprising enjambments, which shift meaning and attention from one line to the next. “Lie to me in the winter/ I’m doing better/ push my foot into the shoes/ lace doesn’t make me sexier/ than I already am,” she writes. By focusing on the internal and domestic spaces of body, bed, and home, Pope imbues them with value and complexity.”
“The success of That Which Comes After is in its dynamic range and sensitivity. Throughout, the book never feels repetitive or tonally redundant. Pope is open to rage, sarcasm, exhaustion, joy, boredom, bewilderment, and the dozens of micro-moments of emotion humans experience every day. “Time passes it takes forever,” she writes, risking melodrama and landing in intimacy: “I tell her I’m focusing / On not dying and she says / Keep doing that.”
"That Which Comes After is an electric high-speed cascade system of close-in perception trading lines with blunt assessment so as to speak from the gauntlet of experience and expose its current scale of crazed happening. Reading it is like having the painter Pat Steir’s waterfalls turned into live absorption machines made of incredibly tough lines that cut and go as musical notation. Alexis Pope has written a long poem made of poems that foreground strings of momentary abjection in order to make plain how much the poet sees and takes and deals with – and from. It’s a tremendously lived-in, spare and unsparing work of power and skill, made to unsettle so many assumptions the average, intimate 'you' makes."
—Anselm Berrigan, Primitive State
"Alexis Pope isn't afraid of the void or hunger, of the dead end as a dead end, of the incomplete and unfulfilled. She'll show it to you and then take you elsewhere, to a small something that is bigger than what we can ever know. It's this commingling of intense desire and infinitesimal reminders that living is real that made me ache and want to devour more and more of these poems that aren't afraid to let anything go, because the poet knows so clearly just how everything ends well before one is ready for that ending. Alexis Pope is the voice of her generation. These are the poems that will tell the true and important and lasting messages of her times."
—Jenny Boully, Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them
"Alexis Pope’s latest book is an archive of the I as changed by the other in the gorgeous vertical latticework of the commonplace life, “the “colorless seams” that define the infinite exchanges between the material world and our interiorities. Pope’s bits of attention accumulate and accrue into the wonder of That Which Comes After, a meditative and airy contemplation on embodiment and connection."
—Carmen Giménez Smith, Milk and Filth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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