Meghan Privitello

One God at a Time

Poetry. Through rapid associations and inquisitions with objects of domesticity, A NEW LANGUAGE FOR FALLING OUT OF LOVE attempts to discover why we must suffer in love, loneliness, and loss, as it engages in dialogue with a grand cast of animate and inanimate objects that also seem to ache to know what it takes to be and feel alive. The speaker is determined to discover "the mathematics of the living" in any way she can, never giving up on the seemingly impossible quest of finding happiness among all that seems ruined.

A New Language for Falling Out of Love

Poetry. NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD is a quiet apocalypse. You won't find huge explosions or sudden extinctions in Meghan Privitello's poems. Here, the days are marked instead by quiet disappearances, abandoned objects, details that might be otherwise overlooked. Objects double as warning signs: "The asbestos siding is a hologram in the leftover sun. / At once, it is a dollhouse made of bones." Animals speak in prophetic visions: "In the dead cells of her skin, / I have found your family. / There is an outline of a great tree. / They are all there—roped / around their necks, hanging." These poems hold a microscope to life's mundane details, but they are also poems of agency—when the apocalypse comes, what use is a "good life?" When the apocalypse comes, Privitello asks us to be honest, unflinching. With each passing day, NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD gets louder and quieter, lonelier and lovelier. The end of the world does not look so different from an ordinary day, so pay attention. In the end, Privitello's poems leave room for regret and the hope of redemption—but not much. "There is no lack of beauty and strangeness in Meghan Privitello's NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD, uncovering museums of dust, shadows, animals, ghosts—the Days of this book are filled with lush vocabulary and witchy diction. I feel totally awake and mystical in their presence."—Bianca Stone "You were mistaken when you thought you were picking up a book of poems & not a new strange knife. In NOTES ON THE END OF THE WORLD, Meghan Privitello preserves & perverts & exploits a landscape where time is most pronounced by its breakages & bizarreness. This collection of post- pastoral, post-apocalyptic, post- romantic poems scream & salve & sour, all at once. The days accrue like rust on an old lover's teeth. At once deeply unsettling & recentering, this collection pleasures & unpleasures, it places the blade in your hand & begs you to slice open an apple or plunge it into your own heart."—sam sax "Amanda Nadelberg, Vasko Popa, and David Lynch had a poetry baby. It is Meghan Privitello. CD Wright is this baby's lyric godmother. It is astonishing how one poet can be so tender while being so endlessly able to make abjection and death—the triumph of the human spirit is so clearly off the table- into art. This voice sings a contemporary and frightening love song about obliteration, self and otherwise."—Cynthia Arrieu-King

Notes on the End of the World

Robert Lopez

Matt Bell

Patty Yumi Cottrell

Sarah Rose Etter

Tom Whalen

Lindsey Drager

Jessica Alexander

Alan Sondheim

C. Dylan Bassett

A. T. Grant

Emma Sovich

Joseph Aguilar

N. Michelle AuBuchon

Ruth Baumann

Eric Lloyd Blix

Trevor Calvert

Hunter Choate

Benjamin Clemenzi-Allen

Jon Cone

Stella Corso

Tim Earley

Knar Gavin

Pamela Gesualdi

Lindsay Herko

Matthew Mahaney

Elizabeth Mikesch

Thirii Myint

Eleanor Perry

W. R. Porter

Jessica Richardson

Boyd Spahr

Adam Strauss

Sara Veglahn

The eleventh issue of Caketrain, featuring new work from Joseph Aguilar, Jessica Alexander, N. Michelle AuBuchon, C Dylan Bassett, Ruth Baumann, Matt Bell, Eric Lloyd Blix, Trevor Calvert, Hunter Choate, Benjamin Clemenzi-Allen, Jon Cone, Stella Corso, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Lindsey Drager, Tim Earley, Sarah Rose Etter, Knar Gavin, Pamela Gesualdi, A.T. Grant, Lindsay Herko, Robert Lopez, Matthew Mahaney, Elizabeth Mikesch, Muxxi, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Eleanor Perry, W.R. Porter, Meghan Privitello, Jessica Richardson, Alan Sondheim, Emma Sovich, Boyd Spahr, Adam Strauss, Sara Veglahn, Tom Whalen. Edited by Amanda Raczkowski, Joseph Reed, Tanner Hadfield and Katy Mongeau.

Caketrain

Meghan Privitello

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