A review by zillanovikov
Fragments from Before the Fall: An Anthology of Post-Anthropocene Poetry by JP Seabright

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

I’ve never really understood poetry.

I know when poetry moves me, when the slivers of words find chinks in my armour in a way that prose is too thick to penetrate the chainmail links. Poetry is a rapier, and prose an anvil. I know when poetry works, but I don’t understand why. 

I know that our world is ending. I know that the crisis of capitalism and inequality and stealing from the earth to uplift the rich cannot be sustained, and I know that what cannot go on must one day stop. I know that the wet bulb event and the tipping points and the destruction of arable land is coming. I know what it means.

JP Seabright knows this too. JP Seabright knows how to turn words into pieces, how to erase everything unnecessary until all that remains is the bright spark, the weapon that will piece my heart. This is a book about what is left, using only the words that escaped being erased and cut-up when they tore into prose and poetry. This book of poetry moves me.