Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award

“Extinction Song is a beautifully sustained and unified work, a mesmerizing and devastating meditation on time and impermanence, how this world changes us and is changed by us. The individual poems probe the spaces of our habitual double-think, the inconsistencies in our logic, as we persist and give birth to a new generation on a planet whose ecological future is in continually greater peril. As John James puts it in “Lullaby,” “I linger at the end, / the edge of it. I tread / the precipice / of the abyss.” This work gives shape to our shared experience at this particular catastrophic juncture in late-stage capitalism. Yet as much as there’s a sense of authentic urgency and emergency in these pages, Extinction Song is not overwrought or hysterical. What surprises me most about these poems is their delicate workmanship, evident in their rhythmic deftness and rich sonic textures, as well as in the attention they pay to language and formal architectures. Through their very poetics, in other words, they attend to this world, both its damages and its promises. In the marvelously specific and centering “Future Perfect,” the poet writes, “there is no Mars, no / plan B. No second-chance / planet to escape to. There is your foot /on the ground and the ground / beneath it. There is / the proof of the red / balloon.” This chapbook makes a good companion.”

—Monica Ferrell, Judge’s Citation

“The feeling and thinking in Extinction Song arise from the experience of fatherhood in a time of climate crisis. An immaculate craftsman, James has fashioned a prosody that holds in productive relation “the real and imminent,” the provocative fact that life “tends/in directions/almost infinite” even during the Sixth Extinction. Most intimate in their meticulousness, each syllable bearing his measured touch, these agile lines track the syntax of “thought as it motions/through the channels of the mind” until the experience of “feeling/thinking” comes alive with riveting immediacy. Calling upon the power of a visionary tradition that includes Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Duncan, and Inger Christensen, Extinction Song reveals the peril and terror within the way we love this world.”

 —Brian Teare

“John James’s Extinction Song is an organism, breathing and thrumming, bound together by sinuous lines, supple rhythms, meshing rhymes. James en-strangens language in poems that surge to life on the page, their sonic twists and flourishes practically overspilling the chapbook’s container. Reading this book rings with the thrill of encountering a new creature. In its grace and tenderness, Extinction Song does magnificent justice to the world it describes.”

—Claire Wahmanholm

Read poems from Extinction Song

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