When the Earth Flies into the Sun

By: Derek Mong

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Synopsis: 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.