Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the 2015 Moon City Poetry Award, delivers a whimsical look at our culture’s obsession with apocalypse as well as a thoughtful reflection on our resources in the face of disasters both large and small, personal and public. Pop-culture characters—from Martha Stewart and Wile E. Coyote to zombie strippers and teen vampires—deliver humorous but insightful commentary on survival and resilience through poems that span imagined scenarios that are not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. The characters face their apocalypses in numerous ways, from strapping on rollerblades and swearing to taking notes as barns burn on the horizon. At the end of the world, the most valuable resource is human connection—someone holding our hands, reminding us “we are miraculous.”
Field Guide to the End of the World
$14.95
Poems by Jeannine Hall Gailey
72 pages
6″ x 9″
978-0-913785-76-8 (paper)
September 2016
“In Field Guide to the End of the World, Jeannine Hall Gailey allies herself with the mutants of the world—from zombie stripper clones to teen girl vampires—but unlike them, she is haunted by the possibility of the world and the self coming to an end. Wry, heartsick and shot through with black humor (Martha Stewart’s “Guide to Apocalypse Living” dispenses advice on “storing munitions in attractive wicker boxes”), these poems about transformation and extinction mournfully remind us via post-apocalypse postcards, notes and instructions, “we were not here first, we will not be here last.”
—Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?
Moon City Press
With series lists in Arts and Letters and Ozarks History and Culture, Moon City Press is a non-profit press that owes much to the energy and dedication of students and faculty at several universities in the Ozarks, including our home base in the English Department at Missouri State University.
