extinction song.jpg
extinction song.jpg

Extinction Song

$19.95

by John James

A collection that combines fixed poetic forms with long-form meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene. 

Extinction Song 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 to 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, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.

by John James

A collection that combines fixed poetic forms with long-form meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene. 

Extinction Song 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 to 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, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.

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Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award

Extinction Song is a beautifully sustained and unified work, a mesmerizing and devastating meditation on time and impermanence, how this world changes us and is changed by us. The individual poems probe the spaces of our habitual double-think, the inconsistencies in our logic, as we persist and give birth to a new generation on a planet whose ecological future is in continually greater peril. As John James puts it in “Lullaby,” “I linger at the end, / the edge of it. I tread / the precipice / of the abyss.” This work gives shape to our shared experience at this particular catastrophic juncture in late-stage capitalism. Yet as much as there’s a sense of authentic urgency and emergency in these pages, Extinction Song is not overwrought or hysterical. What surprises me most about these poems is their delicate workmanship, evident in their rhythmic deftness and rich sonic textures, as well as in the attention they pay to language and formal architectures. Through their very poetics, in other words, they attend to this world, both its damages and its promises. In the marvelously specific and centering “Future Perfect,” the poet writes, “there is no Mars, no / plan B. No second-chance / planet to escape to. There is your foot /on the ground and the ground / beneath it. There is / the proof of the red / balloon.” This chapbook makes a good companion.

–Monica Ferrell, Judge’s Citation

About the Author

John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two previous chapbooks, Winter, Glossolalia and Chthonic, winner of the CutBank Chapbook Prize. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Load 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.

Advanced Praise

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

Format: Paperback
Published: May 2026
ISBN: 9781961209558