Description: How to Survive the Apocalypse, the second collection from poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble, examines the many apocalypses that African Americans have weathered, advising that those who wish to avoid annihilation should "live by rage and joy and turpentine." Trimble reimagines the sonnet and the parable, producing poems of ironic indictment and joyous celebration. The book explores aspects of the Black experience in America, from Black woman pride, Nat Turner, kneeling, and the burning down of fast-food restaurants. Sometimes funny, sometimes biting, How to Survive the Apocalypse connects history to the contemporary and in the writing proves that the only balm for rage is creativity.
Brief description: JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a professor of English and the chairperson of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. Serving as the poet laureate for the state of Alabama from 2026 to 2030, she is also a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellow. American Happiness, her first poetry collection, won the Balcones Poetry Prize, and How to Survive the Apocalypse was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2022 by the New York Public Library. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The Griot, The Offing, and The Blue Lake Review.
Review Quotes: Jaqueline Trimble's How to Survive the Apocalypse is a delicate kind of magic. This is a book that revels in a present and a future so rooted in history that it rhymes. Trimble's poems and stories remind us that apocalypse, for many of us, has been our primary inheritance. This is a collections that sings of all Black folks have endured in this country, not simply as a celebration of that endurance but as a righteous rejection of its continued necessity. I am so thankful for this collection.--Nate Marshall "author of Finna"