Figures for an Apocalypse

“Charming where not terrifying, Figures for an Apocalypse rattles and haunts, glimpsing dystopic terror attentively, mightily, and minutely, and capturing the delicacy of ruin with grace. This book can sweep you up into a dark kind of care about the world, and probably should.” – Emily Toder, author of Science

“This is a collection of episodes about eternity. It’s vast, precise, and unhurried. It could go on forever, in the way that reading a novel can feel as if a new branch of reality is revealed to you, and the world will continue in the mode of its insight forever. The sustained thinking and intense concentration in these poems is what we expect from literature. Edward Mullany wants to understand the world, and he does. He is diligent and comic in his pursuit of endlessness and likeness in these emotional word problems, prayers, moral fables, possible outcomes. This book gets there, where Gertrude Stein says there is no there. Like reading Kafka and Calvino, great stylists who know that style contains philosophy, Mullany conveys elegant, hard-won knowledge about the way of the world.” – Arda Collins, author of It Is Daylight