When the Earth Flies Into the Sun

Overview

When the Earth Flies into the Sun weighs digitalization and ecological disasters against the joys of domesticity. Poems speak back to mass shooters and in the voice of cloud storage. They leap from Greek ruins to intergalactic finales, Nebraskan highways to Paleolithic Hominins first learning to speak. At the book’s center are two long poems, “Midnight Arrhythmia” and “A Poem for the Scoundrel Lucian Freud,” that ground these concerns—for art, the other, and the earth—in bodies. The former, addressed to the poet’s son, is part lullaby and part letter. It tries, like a will, to quantify what we leave behind. The latter, addressed to a painter, considers Caesarian birth, ekphrasis, and the casualties of parenting, for both Freud and the poet himself.

Author Biography

Derek Mong is the author of two poetry collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (2018)—and a chapbook of Latin adaptations from Two Sylvias Press: The Ego and the Empiricist (2017). The Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College, he has held poetry fellowships at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Louisville. His work appears widely: the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, At Length, Two Lines, and Arion. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin(White Pine Press), and currently live with their son in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He blogs at the Kenyon Review Online.