Publisher's Synopsis
Kyle McCord's What to Do in a Time of Impending Doom is a paradox of order and chaos, calm and horror, domestic bliss and terror. These brilliant poems vacillate between these dualities creating a palpable tension that helps us navigate the world, a world undone by pandemics, fake news, and manipulators. But we realize-finally-that it is intimacy, family, and the love of self that will help us all survive this madness and find "the good in this world."
-Paul Brooke, author of Pantagruelian and The Skáld and the Drukkin Tröllaukin. In What to Do in a Time of Impending Doom, Kyle McCord forges a poetics of social justice that is at once ambitious in scope and deeply personal. What's so refreshing about this collection, though, is the way McCord addresses social issues head-on while at the same time offering the complexity and purposeful ambiguity that is missing from much of contemporary discourse. McCord is an exciting and necessary voice in contemporary poetry. Bravo! -Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar and author of Daylight Has Already Come: Selected Poems "'What to Do' is an imperative with a question mark. It's both The Void and portal after portal conjured through the personal and political of a pandemic. You, Reader, get to decide: humor? heartbreak? healing?" -Emma Murray
