Dear Apocalypse

K. A. Hays’ debut collection opens with an invitation to the apocalypse, an act of American bravado that soon gives way to fear of disaster, dread of violence, and grief for the dead. As the book’s “lilies and fowls”—seedlings and swifts, thrushes and pitch pines—feed and grow, they become figures for human struggle. The speaker of these poems longs for God, for a mind that outlasts the body, and for a way to live with acceptance in a world that is chaotic and uncertain. Dear Apocalypse, the reader finds in the closing sections, does not dare the world to end so much as it asks it to stay, and comes “to love / this waking life,” even with its terrors, even in the dark.