What Apocalypse? by Marc McKee

Reviewed by Eric Weinstein

ISBN 978-1-934832-17-2
New Michigan Press, 2008

There are a few collections of poetry in print today that are near-perfectly titled; Marc McKee’s What Apocalypse? is one of them.

McKee’s well-honed sense of irony and impressive wit cut through each poem at surprising angles, revealing the dark humor that lies just below the surface of our world’s end. From the opening line of “We Are All Going to Die and I Love You” (“The world is ending again”) to the last few words of “Electric Company” (“Your night comes swift to my dawn / like a desperate, wasteful kiss / that tells me we are still alive, / and won’t be”), What Apocalypse? presents us with the somewhat disturbing, occasionally humorous, and all-too-human implications of the reader’s presence at Armageddon.

In “Attack Attack,” McKee invites us to consider:

[...] how long it takes
surviving fragments to leach through

the bottom of a coffin, the close room
we wear to the twilight of not being
anymore present—

He likewise reminds us that “we move in the air of this world / which will cover the dent we made when we leave.” In a sense, then, the end of the world does not necessarily depend on the end of the physical earth—after all, in a number of these poems, it explicitly remains—but relies instead on the destruction of individual consciousnesses. In many cases, it is “our” world (or worlds) that is (or are) being obliterated; they can even be destroyed more than once. This is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, in which a Bokononist’s last words upon committing suicide are: “Now I will destroy the whole world...”

Whether McKee’s sensibility in this collection is strictly existential is debatable, but it is clear he believes the world can only be understood—or, possibly, that it only exists—through the lens of human existence, and not in any absolute or abstract way; with such an individualistic and subjective worldview at work, it is easy for us to understand that in McKee’s universe, our private lives can be destroyed while an uninvolved bystander (or perhaps the world itself) looks on, asking us, “apocalypse? What apocalypse?”

Visit New Michigan Press on the web at www.newmichiganpress.com/nmp.

Prick of the Spindle Poetry Editor Eric Weinstein recently graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with an AB in English and Philosophy. His writing has previously appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including The Archive,Wheelhouse Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, and Rainy Day. His poetry hasbeen nominated for inclusion in Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the SmallPresses (2009). A native of New Hampshire, he currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

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