A01=John James
abyss
algae
Author_John James
beargrasscreek
Biome
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ecologyofscale
electricity
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erosion
estuary
floodbanks
Hermippus
holocene
Infinitegyre
outage
parenthood
photosensitive
receptivity
repleteocclusions
shadowandexposure
taxonomy
throughline
totality
tributaries
Product details
- ISBN 9781961209558
- Weight: 86g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2026
- Publisher: Tupelo Press, Incorporated
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A collection that combines fixed poetic forms with long-form meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene.
Extinction Song begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive to the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.
Extinction Song begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive to the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.
John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two previous chapbooks, Winter, Glossolalia, and Chthonic, winner of the CutBank Chapbook Prize. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
