Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems

Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from perhaps the best public poet we have (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding Americas, and the worlds, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Alis conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect historys grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives. Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentines Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the books final section, Little Book of Woe, which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness. At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what youll hear in return is a lifetime of song.