ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change. In this poetry collection, the goddess of spring now comes and goes erratically, drinks too much, and takes a human lover in our warming, unraveling world. Meanwhile, Persephone’s mother searches for her troubled daughter, and humanity is first seduced by the unseasonable abundance, then devastated by the fallout, and finally roused to act.
This ecopoetic collection interweaves the voices of Persephone, Demeter, and a human chorus with a range of texts, including speculative cryptostudies that shed light on the culture of the “Late Anthropocene.” These voices speak of decadence and blame, green crabs and neonicotinoids, mysteries and effigies. They reckon with extreme weather, industrialized plenty, and their own roles in ecological collapse.
Tonally, the poems of this book range between the sublime and the profane; formally, from lyric verse and modern magical-realist prose poems to New Farmer’s Almanac riddles and pop-anthropology texts. At the heart of this varied and inventive collection is story itself, as Demeter deconstructs “whodunits,” as the chorus grasps that mythmaking is an act of “throwing their voices,” and as their very language mirrors the downward spiral of destruction. Together, the collected pieces of Persephone in the Late Anthropocene form a narrative prism, exploring both environmental crisis and the question of how we tell it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Megan Grumbling is the author of Booker’s Point. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, Iowa Review, Memorious, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Grumbling serves as poetry reviews editor for the Café Review, reviews theater for the Portland Phoenix, and teaches at Southern Maine Community College and the University of New England.
REVIEWS
“If the human species is to survive the calamities of the Anthropocene, its fires, floods, and pandemics, what myth will help us remake the world? In these poems, Megan Grumbling peers through the story arc of Persephone’s descent and ascent like a lens, then refracts the narrative. Here Persephone, whose ‘blues beg bright things freed,’ parallels a chorus assailed with ‘flooded beds and swollen tongues’ and a modern Demeter who leads us from grief to gourd-clamor. Part almanac, part anthropological study, part opera, these imagination-affirming poems are profoundly consoling, as Grumbling shows us how to ‘once more make light speak, and sob, and sing.’”
— Katy Didden, author of The Glacier's Wake
"Persephone in the Late Anthropocene brings the goddess back to the light disruptively early, and all bets are off. In vivid scraps and lyric stumbles, in fanciful snippets and realized verse, in songs of joy and cries of lament, also in refrains of plain environmental science (hardly cheering but perhaps the way back from catastrophic climate change), in unsung arias and choral bleats and—despite all—in soaring flights of hope (every sentence a masterwork), this end-times opera drags our terror into the light where it might actually save us, rises from these pages like greenest shoots fleeing the dark, the cold, the cruel."
— Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants, The Remedy for Love, Lucky Turtle
"A stunning experience. . . . Grumbling has succeeded in reinvigorating the Persephone myth for a contemporary audience so viscerally that it is a wonder no one thought to do so before. All readers will be better off for having experienced Grumbling’s work."
Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change. In this poetry collection, the goddess of spring now comes and goes erratically, drinks too much, and takes a human lover in our warming, unraveling world. Meanwhile, Persephone’s mother searches for her troubled daughter, and humanity is first seduced by the unseasonable abundance, then devastated by the fallout, and finally roused to act.
This ecopoetic collection interweaves the voices of Persephone, Demeter, and a human chorus with a range of texts, including speculative cryptostudies that shed light on the culture of the “Late Anthropocene.” These voices speak of decadence and blame, green crabs and neonicotinoids, mysteries and effigies. They reckon with extreme weather, industrialized plenty, and their own roles in ecological collapse.
Tonally, the poems of this book range between the sublime and the profane; formally, from lyric verse and modern magical-realist prose poems to New Farmer’s Almanac riddles and pop-anthropology texts. At the heart of this varied and inventive collection is story itself, as Demeter deconstructs “whodunits,” as the chorus grasps that mythmaking is an act of “throwing their voices,” and as their very language mirrors the downward spiral of destruction. Together, the collected pieces of Persephone in the Late Anthropocene form a narrative prism, exploring both environmental crisis and the question of how we tell it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Megan Grumbling is the author of Booker’s Point. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, Iowa Review, Memorious, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Grumbling serves as poetry reviews editor for the Café Review, reviews theater for the Portland Phoenix, and teaches at Southern Maine Community College and the University of New England.
REVIEWS
“If the human species is to survive the calamities of the Anthropocene, its fires, floods, and pandemics, what myth will help us remake the world? In these poems, Megan Grumbling peers through the story arc of Persephone’s descent and ascent like a lens, then refracts the narrative. Here Persephone, whose ‘blues beg bright things freed,’ parallels a chorus assailed with ‘flooded beds and swollen tongues’ and a modern Demeter who leads us from grief to gourd-clamor. Part almanac, part anthropological study, part opera, these imagination-affirming poems are profoundly consoling, as Grumbling shows us how to ‘once more make light speak, and sob, and sing.’”
— Katy Didden, author of The Glacier's Wake
"Persephone in the Late Anthropocene brings the goddess back to the light disruptively early, and all bets are off. In vivid scraps and lyric stumbles, in fanciful snippets and realized verse, in songs of joy and cries of lament, also in refrains of plain environmental science (hardly cheering but perhaps the way back from catastrophic climate change), in unsung arias and choral bleats and—despite all—in soaring flights of hope (every sentence a masterwork), this end-times opera drags our terror into the light where it might actually save us, rises from these pages like greenest shoots fleeing the dark, the cold, the cruel."
— Bill Roorbach, author of Life Among Giants, The Remedy for Love, Lucky Turtle
"A stunning experience. . . . Grumbling has succeeded in reinvigorating the Persephone myth for a contemporary audience so viscerally that it is a wonder no one thought to do so before. All readers will be better off for having experienced Grumbling’s work."
— EcoTheo Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
I. Ascent
She Was Pulling (Mother’s Song)
While She Was Gone
A Different Kind of Pulling
The New Farmer’s Almanac Puzzle of the Day
seeing her together (the Chorus)
short shorts
The New Farmer’s Almanac Folklore for January
Persephone’s Lark Song
From “Man on Man”: I.2 Myth and Ritual
trying so hard
Blues Song
her lover
Adultery Song
The New Farmer’s Almanac Migration Forecast
thirsting so hard
Swallow Song
From Cli-Fi and One-Offs
her mother
Winter Feast Song
Atrazine
The New Farmer’s Almanac Home Remedies
Cleft Song
revirginize
II. Search
World of Explaining
too susceptible
The New Farmer’s Almanac Puzzle of the Day
Once Song
From “Man on Man”: III.2 Food Practices
trouble eating
Hungry, the Owner
From Cli-Fi and One-Offs
Song of Reasons
fetishes, the language
ever reddening
From “Man on Man”: IV.4 Sport and Recreation
Fruit-Eating Song
our hands
Mystery Itself
sounds in a mouth
V.9 Eating Disorders
Science Tricks for Children
Some of us had started dreaming of motes
A later school, calling itself Anti-Protagonism
I will shrink my stomach so I can abide
Nature Fact of the Day
Too many mirrors
Grow a gourd inside
III. Descent
Syndrome
Grief-Telling
Unnaming
Guilt-Telling
GoDarks or One-Offs
To be Unlit
Un-telling
deadzones
Dead zones?
Rotting Ice? Heatstroke? Fleeing Drowning?
Grief?
What happened?
Before Hades
To the Shine and Clamor
IV. And Ascent
the life of her
Word of the day
frightening, beautiful veins
Love tonic
The Last Epoch to Name
The New Farmer’s Almanac Mystery of the Day
From Cli-Fi and One-Offs
to make light
Light Song
The New Farmer’s Almanac Riddle of the Day
A Funny-Looking Gourd
Notes
Acknowledgments
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC