Near Future E-Book

Suzannah Evans

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 40

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Suzannah Evans' debut collection Near Future is doom-pop-poetry with an apocalyptic edge, a darkly humorous journey through sci-fi lullabies and northern mysteries. This is a future simulation stripped of the space-age gloss of progression - one where the robots have gone rogue and the hopes of a new millennium are malfunctioning; this is a skewed yet oddly familiar world gone uncannily wrong. These playful, sharp, poems are also about more than dystopias and five types of possible apocalypse - in looking at the worst-case scenarios, Evans comes closer to the bigger narrative; universal truths of change, whether man-made or natural, preventable of inevitable, and the uncertain business of human existence where 'there are disasters that you cannot prepare yourself for'. Evans brings a distinctive, skilful and wonderfully peculiar roving eye to our restless and unpredictable times.

Leseprobe

Near Future

Near Future

Suzannah Evans

ISBN: 9781911027461

ePub ISBN: 9781911027645

Copyright © Suzannah Evans

Cover artwork: ‘Projections’ © Bryan Olson

www.bryanolsoncollage.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Suzannah Evans has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published November 2018 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by:

Imprint Digital

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding through Arts Council England.

CONTENTS

A Contingency Plan

The Doomer’s Daughter

Helpline

The Handover

Roboblackbird

Summer with Robobees

The Dark Museum

We just passed on the street

This is The End

The End of the End of the World

Sometimes in your own head

Wholly Communion

Real Time

The New Tenants

The Law of Attraction

The New Curriculum

Future Cities

1. The Censored City

2. The Floating City

3. The Plug-In City

This is England’s greenest city

This morning the walls

The Russian Woodpecker

Reconstructing the Monument

Underground in the new Meanwood

The Taste

Guided Tour

Wyre

Trevor on the Long Mynd

About the Dog

Naming the Hill

Coastal Erosion

Extinct Scents

De-extinction

Skies Recorded by the Cyanometer

The Fatbergs

The Humans and the Starlings

Re-wilding

Craters

Letter into Eternity

The Last Poet-in-Residence

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

‘The Story Just Keeps Going. You’re Supposed To Wrap It Up All Nicely But It’s Real Life. It’s Hard. So I Think I’m Just Going To Have The World Explode.’

Michelle Tea, Black Wave

A Contingency Plan

What if we’re apart when the asteroid comes

or the magnetic storm that shuts off the power?

You could be waiting for a train as the sun’s bulb

flickers out, high above the glass-panelled roof.

I’ll be at work. We’ll lose the phone lines

the door-entry system will go haywire.

I will eat from the vending machine

drink from the competition cupboard

and sleep on nylon carpet with my colleagues

all of us three-weeks unwashed. Stay where you are—

I’ll abseil down eight floors on a rope

made from the supply of festive tinsel

loot M&S, steal a bike and make for the M1

forty miles of silence and abandoned cars

so we can witness the collapse of civilisation

with a picnic of high-end tins

so I can lie in your arms on a rooftop

our dirty faces lit by fires.

The Doomer’s Daughter

I was raised with the knowledge that the worst could happen

on any given day. My schoolbag was weighted with extras;

iodine tablets, dynamo torch, distress flare.

My bedtime stories were from the SAS Pocket Survival Guide

and school holidays were spent in an underground bunker

in Lincolnshire. Dad drilled the whole family every weekend

for the five kinds of apocalypse: nuclear, contagious,

climatic, superintelligent, religious. I can put on a gas mask

and safe-suit in under 60 seconds, even with the light off.

When he died I realised there are disasters

that you cannot prepare yourself for. Still, I drive out

to our safe place every summer, sit on the locked grille

and imagine the provisions he’d gathered down there—

tins going slowly out of date in the darkness

beans in tomato sauce, peach halves in juice.

Helpline

In the call centre at the end of the world

everyone is wearing the rags

of the clothes they came to work in two weeks ago.

From floor ten we count fires in the distance

the smoking remains of suburbs.

Tea breaks are strictly monitored

and the internet is still there

but we are getting tired of news.

We sleep where we’re comfortable—

stairwells, carpet, canteen chairs

Lateness for shifts is not tolerated

although at this stage few of us

have homes to go to.

Demand for the service is high.

I don’t know why I’ve stayed so long in this job

when the world in which I could spend its ample wage

has disintegrated—

politicians in hiding

supermarkets forced open on burst streets.

Perhaps it’s because they all tell me

that my voice could be the last one they hear

perhaps it’s because almost every worried caller

reminds me of my worried mother

or because we talk about wallflowers

and the hunger, the smell of burned paint

reminisce about summer in the park.

Her dog went out two days ago and hasn’t come back

If I’d died he could have eaten me

she says

it sounds like a regret.

The Handover

after Nick Bostrom

Half-way through the presentation

the paperclip machine tells Jamie from marketing