When the Earth Flies Into the Sun

When the Earth Flies into the Sun weighs digitalization and ecological disasters against the joys of domesticity. Poems speak back to mass shooters and in the voice of cloud storage. They leap from Greek ruins to intergalactic finales, Nebraskan highways to Paleolithic Hominins first learning to speak. At the book’ s center are two long poems, “ Midnight Arrhythmia” and “ A Poem for the Scoundrel Lucian Freud,” that ground these concerns— for art, the other, and the earth— in bodies. The former, addressed to the poet’ s son, is part lullaby and part letter. It tries, like a will, to quantify what we leave behind. The latter, addressed to a painter, considers Caesarian birth, ekphrasis, and the casualties of parenting, for both Freud and the poet himself.

Derek Mong is the author of two previous poetry collections from Saturnalia Books— Other Romes and The Identity Thief— and a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist, from Two Sylvias Press. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Free Inquiry, & the New England Review. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxin Amelin (White Pine Press). Together they run the literary journal, At Length. A contributing editor at Zó calo Public Square, he liv