![]() ![]() Pained, tender, and vividly rendered, this elegy for the Anthropocene twines the couple’s philosophical, scientific, and highly personal musings with arresting, often disquieting visions of a natural world in dangerous flux, where “thawing earth” lets loose “corpse-y smells” and ash continually falls. ![]() ![]() Time passes, the Earth grows less hospitable, and as they face a possible ending Alice and Antius increasingly look back, recalling “a summer before the ash fell” and wondering at what point humanity should have understood that it had poisoned its own world. Intensely intimate, the conversation finds the pair holding tightly to each other (“my ear to your heartbeat / listening for a thrill”) as their ever-expanding caravan wends its way through “the hottest summer on record” beneath “clouds flickering over a grave of trees.” The couple seize moments of peace and beauty (“a perfection of calm / a quirk of stars”) as they set about the good work of raising children born to a fallen society. Ingram’s novel-in-verse presents a lyric colloquy between parents and life partners Alice and Antius, the former a scientist, the latter a poet, as they face life in a world ravaged by climate change. ![]()
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