The book is composed of five untitled sections, and the first section hits hard with the world ending in progress. With a list of all the apocalypses the world has already experienced. All of the dystopias we are currently living under.

And then it somehow gets darker, the second section delving more specifically into the worlds that ended through her ancestry -- the occupation and division of Korea. Comfort women. World War II and the atomic bomb. Riot cops. The harrowing line "I come from a short line of women who were handed husbands as salvation from rape."

I imagined/hoped that the collection would be building toward the world going on, to poems of how to live in/love the world even as it is ending, but that is not what happens here. Instead, the fourth section imagines a future world where the ongoing apocalypses have taught us something about how to make the world better. Poems that look back on today the way we look back on the horrors of the Inquisition, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, any past genocide. The most joyful poem in the collection, "Wildlife," is a riff on a quote from Amy Goodman, when she slipped and described a wildlife explosion in Canada rather than a wildfire. Pine martens and black-footed ferrets, shrikes and warblers, short-horned lizards come burbling and giggling out of an oil field.

The final section delivers us back to the present, to doom and loss and loneliness, and finally to the rage we will need to wrench the world from its current path to ruin.

Really, I finished this book feeling flattened, emptied, like most of a day later the air is still just slowly trickling in.

Recommended for fans of Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice and readers feeling a need to cry about the state of the world before waking up ready to fight to fix it. ( )

Fantastic writing. Loved the dynamics of each poem and the diversity of the structure. I felt the central theme while also enjoying the nuance of each poem. Although some left me desolate and nihilistic. Others gave me a renewed sense of hope and a spring in my step. Although I couldn’t personally relate to a lot of the subject matter I know this wasn’t written for me to resonate with in that way. And I appreciate the opportunity to read from a perspective so different from my own. ( )

This book quickly became one of my favorite things I've ever read. My favorite poems were Celebrate Good Times, Science Fiction Poetry, Grief Is A Thing With Tense Issues, Comfort Poem, Unlove Poem, How To Let Go of the World, On How, and Waste. This book has inspired me in my search for poetry that I understand and that makes me feel understood. I feel understood for my trauma in a way I haven't felt before. It's nice. :] ( )

This was an outstanding collection! Explorations of dystopia in our contemporary world, powerful lines about grief, and even some speculative poems. My favorites were “Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel,” “It Is What It Is,” “Science Fiction Poetry,” and “How to Let Go of the World.” ( )