Overview

All the Emergency-Type Structures is a poetic survival manual for those in need of shelter from climate change, American life, motherhood, technology, death, and extinction. These poems navigate both cultural anxieties--climate change, American consumerism, technological creep--and personal anxieties--motherhood, apocalyptic thinking, suburban complacency. What does it mean to face a future in which building emergency-type structures may be necessary for our survival?

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9781732403260

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"Elizabeth Cantwell's ""All the Emergency Type Structures"" is the first book I've read in a long time that feels like a direct transcription of the hellish beauty of living. Humans measure time by the pauses between disasters, and Cantwell's poems register quotidian disappointments and the slow catastrophe of the epoch equally well. When everything is on fire, what do we choose to save? What do we choose to say? Cantwell tells us ""you may erect/a shelter using only carefully chosen language,"" but she never pretends living in it is easy. --Rebecca Hazelton The poems of Elizabeth Cantwell's breathtaking second collection, All the Emergency-Type Structures, are brilliant cries-and acts - of defiance against what seems to be our inevitable erasure from this planet. These poignant elegies-in-advance of apocalypse expose the ways even science has failed us, failed to provide the necessary paradigm to understand our own mortal recklessness. Underneath the expansive canopy of space, earthly landscapes grow increasingly inhospitable to human kind and our presence seems increasingly irrelevant, even banal. Elizabeth Cantwell's luminous intelligence and signature, angular wit reverberate through this poetic survival manual for our own futures. As we ricochet between cosmic and evolutionary angst, we may perhaps be consoled by this stunning book of both ancient times and end times. - David St. John All the Emergency-Type Structures is lyrically post-apocalyptic. It provokes and unsettles. Elizabeth Cantwell's work is visceral and charged with danger, an electrifying account of life in a precarious world. -- Emily Anthes"

Elizabeth Cantwell's All the Emergency Type Structures is the first book I've read in a long time that feels like a direct transcription of the hellish beauty of living. Humans measure time by the pauses between disasters, and Cantwell's poems register quotidian disappointments and the slow catastrophe of the epoch equally well. When everything is on fire, what do we choose to save? What do we choose to say? Cantwell tells us you may erect/a shelter using only carefully chosen language, but she never pretends living in it is easy. --Rebecca Hazelton The poems of Elizabeth Cantwell's breathtaking second collection, All the Emergency-Type Structures, are brilliant cries-and acts - of defiance against what seems to be our inevitable erasure from this planet. These poignant elegies-in-advance of apocalypse expose the ways even science has failed us, failed to provide the necessary paradigm to understand our own mortal recklessness. Underneath the expansive canopy of space, earthly landscapes grow increasingly inhospitable to human kind and our presence seems increasingly irrelevant, even banal. Elizabeth Cantwell's luminous intelligence and signature, angular wit reverberate through this poetic survival manual for our own futures. As we ricochet between cosmic and evolutionary angst, we may perhaps be consoled by this stunning book of both ancient times and end times. - David St. John All the Emergency-Type Structures is lyrically post-apocalyptic. It provokes and unsettles. Elizabeth Cantwell's work is visceral and charged with danger, an electrifying account of life in a precarious world. -- Emily Anthes

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