Alan Catlin
Coming Soon!
Still Life with Apocalypse
by Alan Catlin
ISBN: 978-1-962405-69-0
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alan Catlin has published dozens of full-length books and chapbooks of prose and poetry. Most recently, his poetry books include a trilogy of retrospective work reflecting his thirty-odd years in the bar business, the Carpe Diem series. A book of thematically linked stories narrated by a cynical bar man was published by Anxiety Press as The Naked City, as has a fictional Memoir, Chaos Management by Alien Buddha Press. His most recent books are Unattended from Cyberwit, Landscape of the Exiles from Dos Madres, and Work Anxiety Poems from Roadhouse Press.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
What if The Apocalypse is a slow, incremental, inexorable accumulation of details, like a still death as opposed to a still life? The result would be a study in human of rot and decay instead of the classic still life of fruit in a bowl rendered as an exercise in contrast, color, shadows, and light. The new still life/death represents historical moments frozen in time like photographs of a dream, a nightmare. The accumulation of these details becomes a crime scene in waiting, lacking only a single change agent to complete the cycle of madness, greed, and corruption. What if, then, the final solution to the human condition is a still life with an apocalypse? This book is something like that, a modern Babylon revisited.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Alan Catlin’s Still Life with Apocalypse (what an apt title!) is a whirlwind of a poetry collection, chronicling and bearing witness to various horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with a section on the killing fields of Vietnam, circling back to the horrors of nuclear testing, on to the terror of September 11, 2001, and various smaller atrocities enacted upon and by the United States in the past 80 years. Still Life with Apocalypse is an eloquent, frightening field guide to our terrifying times, encapsulated in this line from the poem, “Missing Peace: a Flyer on Canal Street”—“the end was yesterday.” Alas, too true, but that’s what makes Still Life with Apocalypse such a crucial read in these so fraught times. And as always, Catlin tells his grim tale with flair and verve. A must read to understand what’s going on.
—Robert Cooperman, author of In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains,
winner of The Colorado Book Award for Poetry
In this new collection, Alan Catlin shares an apocalyptic overview of American culture. These are the poems that capture the hellish horrors of climate change, racism, violence, evoking scenes of humanity on the skids. From Vietnam, to Iraq, to New York, San Francisco, and beyond, the reader is assaulted by stories of the damaged and deranged engaged in various crimes against each other and society in general. This compilation of edgy poems draws blood as only Catlin’s work can.
—Jennifer Lagier, editor Monterey Poetry Review, author of Illuminations
Nobody does Armageddon like Alan Catlin.
—Charles Rammelkamp
