Leona Gom, The Catastrophe of Us. North Vancouver, BC: The Alfred Gustav Press, 2021.

http://d-zieroth.squarespace.com/the-alfred-gustav-press

The Alfred Gustav Press is, for me, a new and welcome discovery.  Published by the poet David Zieroth (and named for his father), the press’ attractive chapbooks are only available by subscription.  Every year those lucky subscribers receive three publications along with bonus chapbooks—new, short works by authors previously published by the press. 

Leona Gom’s The Catastrophe of Us is one heck of a bonus.  A short series of quasi-documentary poems based on reading recent books on history, the Anthropocene, and the universe, they rely on those texts for the information that is then turned into a succinct bulletin of alarm. 

The first poem sets the tone by giving us a thumbnail history of predictions of the end of the world, such as the Pope’s declaration on the Muslim conquest of Constantinople.  All this crying wolf has made it easy to dismiss the next Cassandra who comes along:

Because by now, into the next millennium,

we’ve had too many last days, because

the world has ended again and again,

because we have been hunted and haunted

by all the horsemen and all the prophesies

and all the extinctions and still come back

from them all.  Because we populate the world

again and again with our relentless survival,

doing more of what we’ve always done,

and in spite of all we know and because of it

we still expect the cycles of punishment

and forgiveness, our excuses now

both our knowledge and our ignorance.

Because we have written too often

the history of the future.

But as we all know by now, the (end) times they are a changin’.  The threats are real.  Some are politically created crises (bodies washed ashore in Malta), others more direct extinctions (“We are fierce with our murders and wars and genocides”).  Gom does, however, offer some dubious comfort in offering the fact that we are far less successful killers of humans than mosquitoes.   

Those efficient mosquitoes aside, our species does not come off well:

When told he might have shot

the last wild passenger pigeon,

the man went home and told his wife

that he was overcome with

pride and an unspeakable joy.

The wonder of it is that Gom has made such energetic poems out of her dour reading.  This small chapbook of smart, engaging and engaged poems have the peculiar effect of making you feel better and worse at the same time.  Worth the price of the whole 2021 subscription, I’d say.