r112 pages
ISBN: 978-1-931824-45-3
Publication date: April 2012
$20.00

APOCALYPSO

by Evelyn Reilly

Evelyn Reilly’s most recent book of poetry, Apocaplyso, continues the dystopic re-working of poetry about the biosphere that she began in Styrofoam (Roof Books, 2009). Reilly’s new work eschews form for contour, syntax for taxonomy, and content for thematics. A lot of writers essay new nature poetry. Reilly changes the nature of poetry by reflecting structures of the environment in her poetic performance. Apocalypso ends poetry as we know it with a bang.

Evelyn Reilly’s Apocalypso floats a cobbled kind of futurist voyage that moves by belief and uncovered loss to quickly deliver an overwhelming sensation (allegory) that as in Tarkovsky’s Solaris we are on this journey too and have no hope (and want none) of getting off it. Turning these pages we discover that the museum of the future is a ship and Evelyn Reilly is scribbling our fate.
- Eileen Myles

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me amid the mechanic orders? Well, if you listen closely, faint yet clear signals are being emitted from Evelyn Reilly’s Apocalypso wherein fragments of information technologies now dispersed in the ether create haunting assemblages of ourselves. Fascinating!"
- Marjorie Welish

“Site-specific used to mean how deeply something was embedded in a land¬scape; now it refers to how thoroughly you’re being data-mined. Evelyn Reilly’s Apocalypso playfully speaks a twisted techno-bureaucratese in which alienation threatens to become the norm, and we’ve never been further from our dreams: ‘I am so lonely / I've been talking to my software / for three years.’ Amid a language of climatological meltdown lifted from the Book of Revelation, Reilly astutely uses moments of transient beauty and a sense of humor to remind us that human beings still remain the primary interface in an increasingly post-human age.”
- Alan Gilbert

Evelyn Reilly lives and writes in New York City. Her previous books include Styrofoam, also published by Roof Books, Hiatus, from Barrow Street Press, and Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces, from Portable Press at YoYo Labs.