If This Should Reach You in Time - by Justin Marks (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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."

Review Quotes

"Like a diamond drill bit, Marks bores into the heart of the matter...His singular voice contends with the universality of existential dread without artifice or grandeur, but rather in the most intimate, nearly imperceptible moments that render us human-fallible, but full of grace."

-Su Hwang

"Justin Marks is willing to be vulnerable, he is able to question what poetry can do-what language itself can do-to depict the drama of the human mind"

-Ilya Kaminsky

Justin Marks has a problem. He's a poet who hates poetry, which is good for us. We don't want poetry. We want lies. That's where the art is.

- Wayne Coyne

These poems move like hitchhikers: reckless but driven, youthful but wise, their eyes on the destination and their baggage flying every which way. Hop in, Justin Marks. Let's get out of here.

- Daniel Handler

With a voice like an antenna, Marks sifts through the strata of reality-the sex and death, work and time, uncertainty and enigma-to present us with a life where the malady is the melody. These are lonely poems, bearded poems, wet dream poems, lunch poems, poems of the roomy heart, and undeniably human poems. You'll go: Me too.

- Melissa Broder

"Here is a rarely expressed self-awareness that accedes as little to words as it does to the pain of the condition itself"

-Fanny Howe