Addiction Apocalypse Volume 46

Remi Recchia is a Lambda Special Prize-winning poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. An eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Best of the Net 2025, among others. He is the author of two collections of poetry and four poetry chapbooks, and he is the editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies. Remi has received support from institutions such as Tin House, PEN America, and the Poetry Foundation. He holds an MFA in poetry and a Ph.D. in English. Remi is currently pursuing an M.Div. at Yale University.

"What is the line between myth and extinction?[...]What is the line between ownership and grace? In Remi Recchia's Addiction Apocalypse, poems dance along these lines with lyric intensity and narrative grace. Funny and tender, proud and self-deprecating, this collection chronicles a life of transition, conviction, and addiction, one where every injection is a baptism, one that dwells in the everyday of Taco Bell, Mike Flanagan shows, rent debt, and 90-day chips, but also reaches for something more, shout(s) hallelujahs until my throat is sore. Recchia gives answer to the question "What happens when the apocalypse is churning in your own body?" The answer is that you survive." —Donna Vorreyer, author of To Everything There Is"'We didn't have the words,' says Remi, the trans speaker of 'Dead Name,' the opening poem in Addiction Apocalypse. The word transition began as a noun of action, and this is a poetry in the act of finding the much-needed words to talk about the body, to talk about change and hardship, intimacy ('we are always talking') and fulfillment. The Remi who speaks in these poems, having, as he says, 'waited the dark,' articulates beautifully, with an often astonishing honesty, the arduous passage from waiting to action to realization." —Nancy Eimers, author of Human Figures"In Remi Recchia's Addiction Apocalypse, 'transformation' is the vital force underpinning the speaker's core humanity: transformed bodies, transformed minds, transformed relationships, and transformed worlds characterize the lived experience and rich sociocultural landscapes that populate these poems. Simultaneously urgent and playful, Recchia's resonant lyricism stewards the reader on a journey through the complex layers of interrelated change: gender transition and familial loss, renewed spirituality and addiction crisis, mental illness and the whirlwind of new love intertwine. The speaker could try to pull them apart, to hold them separate from one another inside himself, but why would he? A triumph in transmasculine poetics, Addiction Apocalypse celebrates the messy, brilliant tapestry of a life lived in refusal of stagnation." —Jacob Griffin Hall, author of Burial Machine

• Part I: FIND YOUR SAFEHOUSE Dead Name Sailor's Knot Baptism Before I Grew Up, There Was a War Gravedigger Gifts Paying for top surgery is like going to debtor's prison Sinker First Ghazal for the Bumps on My Spine Dear Hiring Committee Are You Okay, Mike Flanagan? Linked Haiku with Ex-Boyfriend & Tree Sap Your Therapist Has Surfer Dude Energy Tabernacle from acorn to oak, or, after but not because of surviving the unsurvivable, i become a man Remi with Ghost & Joan of Arc Part II: HOW WILL WE GO ON LIVING How Will We Go on Living Part III: ADDICTION APOCALYPSE Things I Can't Tell My Landlord At a baseball game in ninety-degree weather, the man in front of me On Learning of a Friend's Suicide While Waiting in Line at the Local Taco Bell Triptych: To the People I Never Hit Drunk Driving The Men at Home Ninety Days The Lights Football Tailgate: Field Notes There's nothing quite like taking a shot of bottom-shelf whiskey mulberries When We've Been Married Nearly a Year, My Wife and I Share a Toothbrush for the First Time We're in the car on Main Street & it's dark my brother died Remi, in the Night When the world ended, Acknowledgments Notes About the Author 21st Century Poets