Writing from the Edge of Collapse

with poems & prompts by Caitlin McDonnell & Joan Kwon Glass

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

This week’s guest writer is Caitlin McDonnell

From Caitlin: I have been writing poems of survival since I was 14. Not sure I'd be here without them. I write very much from the present, which feels necessary to record because it is extraordinary and precarious and temporary. I have become increasingly aware of our precarity in recent years as we spiral towards climate collapse and autocracy.

Caitlin Grace McDonnell was a New York Times Poetry and Fine Arts Work Center fellow. She has published poems and essays widely, including a chapbook, Dreaming the Tree (2003) and two books of poems, Looking for Small Animals (2012) and Pandemic City (2021). She lives with her daughter and teaches writing in NYC.

Buy Caitlin’s latest poetry collection below!

Richard Wilbur said, “One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable by clear, precise confrontations.” When it feels like the world is ending, we notice things around us in a new way. Our attention becomes very present to detail. That’s what fueled my latest book of poems, Pandemic City, written while New York City was in lockdown in 2020. The world is always ending a little bit, isn’t it? My new manuscript in progress is called Letters From the End of the World and in it I try to stay present to my experience and record the beautiful details with a heart open despite clear eyes on our demise.

Here are two of my poems, written in this vein:

Okay! Ready to write?