Nick Lantz – författare

With macabre humor, You, Beast explores the roots and limits of human empathy. Nick Lantz examines our strange, absurd, and often brutal relationship with other animals, from roaches scuttling across the kitchen floor to pigs whose heart valves can replace our own. In poems ranging from found text to villanelles, and from short plays to fables, this lyric collection tracks the troubled ways we define our humanity through mythology, language, politics, art, and food.

“Is that something I should put in a poem?” asks Nick Lantz in The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That. The resounding answer is yes! A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author’s cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism.Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz’s collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection. All titled “Word of the Day,” these poems capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse.“You can't carry water in a sentence,” says the author—but after reading this collection it just might seem possible. These poems depict the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending and remind us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives.Life is all gilded frescoesand Arnold Palmers at the clubhouse until Titus and his men pass through with torches, until CortÉs and his men pass through with torches, until Sherman and his men and so on, until men forget what their hands looked like without torches.—Excerpt from “Ruin”