'Extinction Song is a beautifully sustained and unified work, a mesmerizing and devastating meditation on time and impermanence, how this world changes us and is changed by us. The individual poems probe the spaces of our habitual double-think, the inconsistencies in our logic, as we persist and give birth to a new generation on a planet whose ecological future is in continually greater peril. As John James puts it in "Lullaby," "I linger at the end, / the edge of it. I tread / the precipice / of the abyss." This work gives shape to our shared experience at this particular catastrophic juncture in late-stage capitalism. Yet as much as there's a sense of authentic urgency and emergency in these pages, Extinction Song is not overwrought or hysterical. What surprises me most about these poems is their delicate workmanship, evident in their rhythmic deftness and rich sonic textures, as well as in the attention they pay to language and formal architectures. Through their very poetics, in other words, they attend to this world, both its damages and its promises.

In the marvelously specific and centering "Future Perfect," the poet writes, "there is no Mars, no / plan B. No second-chance / planet to escape to. There is your foot /on the ground and the ground / beneath it. There is / the proof of the red / balloon." This chapbook makes a good companion.' --Monica Ferrell.