it’s been pretty bleak these past few years—for those of us privileged enough to feel the relative shift, the prevailing fatalistic mood—&the apocalypse has been on my mind. perhaps it has been on yours too? &what does it mean to consider the apocalypse at this moment? oscillating between a joke on twitter &a real fear that grips you in the moments between sleep &waking; an ambivalent attachment, dread, acceptance, entertainment, hope, a kind of giving up, a withdrawal, intellectual, or pragmatic; i’ve been reading writing that clicks into some familiar temporality, a sense of impending doom—speaking to this moment where we are reckoning with the devastations of global warming—even as annihilation is never total, &new &ancient forms of living &thriving continue to flourish on the margins &in the garbage piles of history. nuclear war? climate change? epidemic? whatever the case—here are some poems &novels that i’ve been reading at the end of the world—

in Ling Ma’s novel Severance we follow Candace Chen, a millennial 1.5-gen Chinese American who pursued her artistic aspirations to a dead-end job in a publishing firm; mired in the lucrative but unglamorous production of niche Bibles. as she navigates the violent (if quotidian) inequities of global capitalism via the Shenzhen to NYC commodity production chain (the workers in the Shenzhen factory grinding the stones for the Gemstone Bible are developing a respiratory illness &none of her non-Chinese-American colleagues seem to care); a zombie-ish apocalypse starts to interrupt routine. &amidst the collapse of the everyday, the novel asks what really is the difference between continuing to turn up to the dim monotony of your late-capitalist desk job, or not? as New York becomes emptier &emptier Candace haunts the city &the internet simultaneously,; posting photos of the desolate cityscape on her blog, NY Ghost.