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THE BOOK OF DROUGHT by Rob Carney Kirkus Star

THE BOOK OF DROUGHT

Poems

by Rob Carney

Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 2024
ISBN: 9781680033922
Publisher: Texas Review Press

Rainfall is but a forlorn memory in a world ravaged by climate change in these plangent poems.

Carney, a Utah Valley University English professor and winner of the 2023 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, here envisions a near future in which global warming has led to eternal drought. Rivers and lakes dry up, forests wither away, land animals die of thirst, and high temperatures in the Bering Sea kill off nine billion crabs; power plants impose blackouts to conserve trickles of cooling water, and bathtub and sink faucets have nothing coming out (the toilet situation goes mercifully unexplored). A narrator called “the Listener and Reservoir and Scribe” records people’s impressions of the parched hellscape and their memories of the wet, lush world they once enjoyed. Some voice outrage at the new normal (“What kind of bullshit God / wouldn’t already know?” seethes a girl when the governor asks citizens to pray for rain); some wallow in moisture-related reveries (“Say, the sound of a lake / against a boat dock: like tucking in a child, / or like slosh / whenever wakes come rolling”); some console themselves with wan simulacra (“We paint the rocks blue / so they look less like tombstones. / So the riverbeds—dry now, / just paths for deer to walk— / seem less like ghosts”). Rendered in vivid, impressionistic verses, Carney’s scenario frames a set of captivating hymns to the forces of nature, ably conveying the sense of longing for a vibrant planet and sorrow over its degradation. In his richest flights, Carney’s ravishing lyricism articulates a divine communion with the land: “For the wedding of the forest and the moon, / everyone was there, / even wolves / stepping out from the treeline….the river and falls / to add music, / and the rain coming down / to be a witness, / and the sky gave the Future as a gift.”

A terrific collection that grounds an anguished ecological sensibility in gorgeous writing and deep emotion.