Rot & Ripening - by Rissa Pappas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Rot & Ripening is a fantasy.

Rot & Ripening is one possible future in three voices.

Rot & Ripening is a thought experiment: what happens when you remove the men from the world?

Rot & Ripening asks: when you remove men from the world, are you left with a utopia, or the same reality?

Rot & Ripening contains stories told in poems.

Rot & Ripening does not celebrate violence but sits in the quiet aftermath and asks: what now?

Rot & Ripening shows that even when the world ends, there is still work to be done.

Rot & Ripening is speculative fiction wrapped in poetry.

Review Quotes

Through the strangeness of the unreal, Rissa Pappas reveals human truths, blending the expansive world-building of speculative fiction with the exquisite imagery of poetry. Immediately establishing the atmosphere, the collection opens, "Women move through ruins single file / winding under veils of hornet swarms." Rot & Ripening refuses to shy away from the dark and difficult, while moments of lighter absurdity, such as eating "McMuffins every day," offer us the levity to consider even the toughest aspects of our existence. Through deftly crafted narrative verse, Pappas' words allow us to be truly human. These poems acknowledge the complex "remnants of rage spilling out as joy" so that we might be able to ask, "What now?"

-Heather Lang-Cassera, author of Firefall and Gathering Broken Light

After the world ends, the women walk. They walk through ruins and wildflowers, through silence and song, through grief that composts into joy. In Rot & Ripening, Rissa Pappas delivers a post-collapse world in three distinct yet interwoven voices: Executioner, Caretaker, and Conjurer.

Women scale the wreckage of a broken world-not as mourners, but as architects of rebirth. Their journeys are fierce and tender, weaving like oral histories carried across generations. These poems are spells. They are bones and breath. Written in rhythms that feel like memory and language that feels like prophecy, Rissa's lyrical clarity startles and soothes, crafting a future from the wreckage of the past-where love is survival, and survival is sacred.

Rot & Ripening is not just a collection of poems-it's a ceremony, a reckoning, and a path forward through what is yet to come. This is a book for anyone who has ever longed to begin again."

- Letisia Cruz, author of Bigwig's Illustrated Guide to Birds and Migrations & Other Exiles

For centuries [guns] made men into apex predators. And then we killed them all." In the wake of a decisive gender overthrow, Rissa Pappas' Rot and Ripening delivers a speculative imagining of a world purged of what women fear in the dark. Alternating between prescient verse and prose poems, Pappas chronicles the saga of three generations of sister soldiers on a propulsive journey from apocalyptic cityscapes littered with corpses, diamonds fallen out of go bags, and dwindling McMuffins as the grid fades through a plastic-saturated wasteland to arrive centuries later at a sapphic coven that basks in the ancestral knowledge of nature. Through it all, Pappas' voice pierces like a spotlight as she unmakes the world to let in the light.

- Sarah M. Sala, author of Devil's Lake