Extinction Song combines fixed poetic forms with longform meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene. The book begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive at the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, these poems highlight the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.

John James

John James is the author of two collections of poetry, The Delusion of Being Absolute (Milkweed, forthcoming 2028) and The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The feeling and thinking in Extinction Song arise from the experience of fatherhood in a time of climate crisis. An immaculate craftsman, James has fashioned a prosody that holds in productive relation 'the real and imminent,' the provocative fact that life 'tends/in directions/almost infinite' even during the Sixth Extinction. Most intimate in their meticulousness, each syllable bearing his measured touch, these agile lines track the syntax of 'thought as it motions/through the channels of the mind' until the experience of 'feeling/thinking' comes alive with riveting immediacy. Calling upon the power of a visionary tradition that includes Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Duncan, and Inger Christensen, Extinction Song reveals the peril and terror within the way we love this world." —Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days and Poem Bitten by a Man