Description

Barrelhouse, paperback

Publication Date: December 15, 2022

Publisher Marketing: IF THIS SHOULD REACH YOU IN TIME sounds the alarm of climate change and democratic collapse with tender lament and guarded hope from award-winning poet Justin Marks.

“There’s no way around / not being part / of the problem” Marks writes in “Along for the Ride,” “The best case scenario / is long term disaster”.

In his fourth collection of poetry, Marks renders global threats as intimate and personal. As we turn inward, terror and sadness take hold. This is a book of crisis and dread, both human and spiritual.

Through these poems, we see what could be and what might have been. In the titular poem, Marks writes “…know / that we didn’t see / the disaster coming / That it wasn’t / imaginable, hadn’t / existed until, gradually / it was, and did / Or that we saw it / and refused to believe / Or saw it and thought / something or someone / else would save us.”