Field Guide to the End of the World by Jeannine Hall Gailey... A Review

Field Guide to the End of the World by Jeannine Hall Gailey, winner of the 2015 Moon City Poetry Award, delivers a whimsical look at our culture’s obsession with apocalypse as well as a thoughtful reflection on our resources in the face of disasters both large and small, personal and public. Pop-culture characters—from Martha Stewart and Wile E. Coyote to zombie strippers and teen vampires—deliver humorous but insightful commentary on survival and resilience through poems that span imagined scenarios that are not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. The characters face their apocalypses in numerous ways, from strapping on rollerblades and swearing to taking notes as barns burn on the horizon. At the end of the world, the most valuable resource is human connection—someone holding our hands, reminding us “we are miraculous.”

What Did I Think? Field Guide to the End of the World is not your grandmother's book of poetry. You won't be finding it in that dusty corner in the far recesses of your local library either. Jeannine Hall Gailey's poetry is fresh, lively, and opens your mind to the possibilities all around us. Jeannine takes the idea of the end of the world and creates amazing stories that just happen to be in the form of poetry. If the world was ending, what would you do? What would it look like? Who would be on your mind? I didn't know what to expect, but quickly found myself hooked. From Martha Stewart 's Guide to Apocalypse Living, where we read about Martha stockpiling drones and lemons, to Teen Girl Vampires wanting "to be loved and fed, in that order", I couldn't help but smile, but even though her wry sense of humor is evident in some poems, other poems are thought-provoking, such as this excerpt from Notes from Before the Apocalypse, where...

There was a halo around a gibbous moon. 

The horses all lay down in their fields. 

Children died in a school holding hands. 

Tornadoes right through the city centers ripped up everything we had built...

These poems are meant to be savored and I enjoyed reading them. This is what contemporary poetry should be and I dare anyone to sit down and not enjoy these poems by Jeannine Hall Gailey! I am so glad I got a chance to experience Jeannine Hally Gailey through her poetry thanks to Poetic Book Tours! 4 stars from this poetry reader! BTW, if you enjoy dystopian fiction you should enjoy this book of poetry too! Available from Amazon now!


About the Poet:

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as second poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of four previous books of poetry:Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, and included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.