Soft Apocalypse. Leah Nieboer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. 94 pages.


If entropy fell in love with decadence, their union would trigger an event called Soft Apocalypse, Leah Nieboer’s first poetry collection and winner of the 2023 Georgia Poetry Prize as chosen by Andrew Zawacki. In this “phosphenic” debut, a voluptuous dissipation propels Nieboer’s speaker through the death throes of late-capitalist America, on elliptical orbits down desert highways at night, past buildings collapsed from municipal negligence, into underground networks of mutual aid where the heart of resistance still beats. Faced with dissolution on all sides, the elusive speaker takes refuge in a dreamstate induced by any number of stimuli—cities, parties, substances, anonymous lovers—to gauge whether intimacy is possible in a falling empire, or whether we are each doomed to a private crisis of distance here at the ideological end. Brief encounters crisscross back alleyways perfumed with smoke, spotlit in blue, a silk dress here, three kisses there in the vacant lot, the rented room, to set a mood of sultry urban decay. But for all this disaffection, the speaker is rarely alone. As often a we as an I, she need not brave a solitary rapture but will manifest an lyrically ecstatic one, however uncertain, in shared purpose with her companions.

Thoroughly cinematic, the poems in Soft Apocalypseunwind like a noir film reel onto the cutting room floor of the page, “the runtime spooling out // over the counter,” the speaker “cross-referencing herself” (14) in a stream of consciousness, “a spliced montage of // stolen     split-level dreams” (41). Verse and prose alike sit double-spaced or broader, “in the wider aperture // of what happened” (87), thriving on the potentiality of white space and almost defying citation. Sometimes twice a sparse page, an italicized voice interrupts the normal typeface to whisper intimate asides that layer the text into a two-part counterpoint of external dialog and inner monolog or summary and scene; sometimes the intimate voice channels the “strange beloveds” and literary fellow travelers of Lispector and Rilke in oblique reference. Other times, the intimate voice homes in on the speaker’s deep truths, as in “I LET HER GO ON LET US RUMBLE IN THE FOG,” in which “I pass the house breaking apart at the edge of my dreams. we begin from the ruin we helped cause, I think, but who isn’t going around here with a name or two sewn to their chests, right here honeyout in the open” (28). Throughout the collection, Nieboer splices selves and lovers in body, speech, and action, sequences so fragmentary one would get lost in its recombinations if the center did not hold around the speaker’s quest for intimacy.

            A poet’s job of witness can feel fiddling, an accessory to calamity until we remember the role is equal parts documentary for the sake of recorded history. In “DREAM OF A SENSIBLE FACTORY,” the speaker and her fellows watch social and environmental disaster unfold: “on the hottest day of the year / under the influence of Venus, swimming / without order, sweat on the upper lip, we observe the going world” (69). Here the speaker acknowledges her own smallness in contrast to planetary events: climate change, and for scale, Earth’s tertiary position in an outlying solar system of one galaxy among two hundred billion. On the cusp of apocalypse, why not give into Venus’s magnetism and let the forces of attraction have us? To do so makes meaning of its own minute kind. Because:

           

the tone is flexible, meteoric, we return, we make

fortunate exchanges, cheap toolkits

for heartbreak, unplanned catastrophe, STDS, bad dreams,

nobody is an impossible

body, we stitch it into the soft clasp

before sending the materials

to the middles and borders, to the northern edge,

of a city mid-composition—

it’s all so fucked, we say to each other—

and keep going—(69–70)

The act of assembly—whether of an emergency pack, a cooperative factory, or a sanctuary city —attains to community activism in crises both quotidian and alien. The poem’s intimate voice pauses to affirm the validity of all bodies, assuring us “nobody is an impossible / body” as catastrophe threatens the already precarious position of the sick and disabled when infrastructure fails. Take heart, the speaker and her fellows urge: we see your humanity and relay our tangible warmth to you. Indeed, sending affirms the sender as much as the recipient. To have Others keeps the speaker in motion at a moment of crisis that might otherwise incapacitate.
                In the panamorous triptych “MINOR EVENTS,” the speaker seeks connection in swimming pools public and private only to find unity in the memory of self-orchestration. Water and aerospace imagery lends a fluid, dissociative, almost ketamine-infused atmosphere to her peregrinations in the end-times. A cosmonaut in a public pool tempts onlookers in a “slick ruby suit [whose] shimmering belly / [...] / wants to be licked / the sun does it” (5), a permissible misdeed even in public because the sun keeps its own social code. In another pool, more exclusive, the speaker wears “hardly anything / a little blue,” yet the man who invites her there “never got in the water / sat above me on the ledge just / dipped his fingers in” (26), refusing to join her in buoyant experience. If connection were made, these events might turn major; as they stand, the contact is minor. But for all these passing encounters, the speaker confesses, “I believe in love // in the prayers crossing up / this completest dark” (62). In this world, one of many, her grandfather sings in her grandmother’s room, and she remembers pulling out all the stops, “opening the valves dolce, viola, / vox humana all at once / at the pump organ, hers, / my bare feet / the felt pedals” (63), all humanity’s sound fluted by and through her body. The three “MINOR EVENTS” convey the speaker from youthful impressionability to nostalgic harmony without her earlier need for social affirmation.
              So too with swimmers, the pulse and respiration of these poems tell us everything about the speaker’s physiologic state as she abstracts her desires into hyperarticulate observation. In “FLASH PROCESSING OF A PRIVATE YEAR,”

the clavicle punctures up

the nerves articulate the back of

the heart doing its best

stalling the mean angular motion of

stratum her body flinty

the body an event eventual

everybody open and fantasizing

in collapsing fashion (13–14)

This collection of parts might describe an orgy none has managed to actualize beyond their own body. It is the conceptual poet’s equivalent of punching their crush on the playground and running away to express interest: “barely audible pulmonics // intimating will you call me // can you let me know if” (17). While the reader grounds themself in the speaker’s reportage from the brink of disaster, the speaker grasps at metrics and measurements to ward off anxiety with calculated divination. She saves up “lifecyclescrumpled receipts // [...] // against the atomic clock // velocity escapes” (14) and notes “the official measure of // a complete and undeviating // orbital oranging everybody” (16). But like poems, official records amount only to documents if not applied to reality, as when “they only use the word containment // or was it contaminant /// after somethings (well many somethings) // spilled” (17). Against the backdrop of municipal misdirection and disavowal where the status quo imperils the soul, the speaker retreats into the comforts of the body: “a bright pink pill // [...] // we all need a little help sometimes // baby” (15) and “the harmless marvel of her thigh” (19), “her // softbound recursive push overflow” (20). The collection is relentlessly sexy.
               
                I find a distillation of the book’s themes in “OR WAS LIVING LIKE A SLEEPWALKER THE GREATEST ACT OF TRUST?,” an impractically romantic and dangerous hypothesis by which the speaker laments her irremediable confinement to interiority. In the month of January, “I’ve walked at least a hundred years to their ashtray ends in a drainage ditch, [...] or here, the parking lot of the Blue Sparrow, a handful of quarters in the meter,         o vacancy !     the last time we were together you could not look me in the eye. [...] chrome angels coming through the walls for me—only I will know. a soft girl leaning away. figures in the anemic glow” (27). The equation of buyable time falters here, where quarters extend a lease to remain but leave an unfilled emptiness, a roadside-motel brand of homecoming. The presence of angels suggests a wish for deliverance the book indicates none of us has yet earned; angels made of chrome moreover admit the slickness such a deus ex machina would entail. “[O]nly I will know,” the intimate voice confides. If achieved, this will be a private solace, a private triumph.
            The speaker comes out against teleology early in the collection—“I refused to participate in ultimate events” (11) in “GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST,” aleatory as winds are—and yet by the end, discovers a worthy relational cause in the Other. By the “WASHED-UP ULTRAVIOLET MORNING,” despite “misinformation going around” (57):

anything is possible

anything is possible—

if there were a place

to draw one continuous line

against another—

this could be it,

us folding each other up

at the corners

indications of future occurrences (59–60)

Her origami love defies Euclidean geometry, in which parallel lines cannot meet, to enfold participants on a parallel course, into a devoted tesseract that bends time and space with “microchemical raptures /// softly ceasing /// to be directional— /// being dimensional instead—” (60). If we lovers cannot know where we are going, at least we can square our real-time location in the world.

The twelve pages of the last poem, “SPACE WITHOUT MAP,” cycle through the speaker’s “cool dispossession” (86) and expectation to admit loneliness for the impetus of an external someone. That night,

        I was only reaching then

        for the stranger

        for a rub of her future

        like an unmarked rest

        in the measure

        of the hands

        in the moment—

        I’d had enough

        of the moment—

                                it collapsed me (89)

The book until this point has watched the speaker take stock of the present because “it’s important to me // to memorize one’s own // temporary address, a clatter // without insurance” (82–3), as if always knowing where we are might orient us to disaster. But finally, stasis itself is crushing. The speaker has at length sized up and exhausted the present “in the measure // of the hands” and reaches out for the friction of alterity. In a sharp turn toward luxury after austerity, the speaker finds herself

aslant in the shimmering

back of a stretch limousine

with a couple of

gorgeous people—

we were giving ourselves some place

to go—

                          here—

we were giving each other

explicit reasons

 

to go on. (90)

So cooperative is this turn toward a collective future that the poem skirts individual names in favor of a group ethos that motivates each member in the others. Here is the intimacy the speaker has sought throughout: corporeal and existential, communal, and beautiful and rich besides.

                In moving us through present insufficiencies to future potentialities, Soft Apocalypse occupies the place of the contemporary avant-garde. As Clement Greenberg says in “Avant Garde and Kitsch” (1939), “the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to ‘experiment,’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence” (5). In the best possible way, this collection does nothing else. Amid the disasters of the present—economic precarity, dehumanizing policy, and outright war—Leah Nieboer’s Soft Apocalypse offers hallucinatory, rapturous forward momentum in a chaotic world.