The End of Everything and Everything That Comes After That

“Is that something I should put in a poem?” asks Nick Lantz in The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That. The resounding answer is yes! A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author’s cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism.

Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz’s collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection. All titled “Word of the Day,” these poems capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse.

“You can't carry water in a sentence,” says the author—but after reading this collection it just might seem possible. These poems depict the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending and remind us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives.

Life is all gilded frescoes
and Arnold Palmers 

at the clubhouse until Titus and his men 
      pass through with torches, 
until CortÉs and his men 
pass through with torches, until Sherman 

and his men and so on, 
until men forget 
what their hands looked like without torches.
—Excerpt from “Ruin”

“Is that something I should put in a poem?” asks Nick Lantz in The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That. The resounding answer is yes! A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author’s cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism.

Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz’s collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection. All titled “Word of the Day,” these poems capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse.

“You can't carry water in a sentence,” says the author—but after reading this collection it just might seem possible. These poems depict the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending and remind us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives.

Life is all gilded frescoes
and Arnold Palmers

at the clubhouse until Titus and his men
pass through with torches,
until CortÉs and his men
pass through with torches, until Sherman

and his men and so on,
until men forget
what their hands looked like without torches.
—Excerpt from “Ruin”

Nick Lantz is the author of four previous books of poetry, including You, Beast (winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry) and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House (winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry). His poems have appeared in many journals as well as in the Best American Poetry anthology. He has won several awards, including the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lantz teaches in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, Texas, with his wife and cats.

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