Mark Wallace

The End of America, Book Fifteen Mark Wallace

The End of America, Book Fifteen is a long poem exploring the cityscape of San Diego, California as it appeared between September 2015 and May 2016. Apartment complexes, streets, yards, cranes, boats, bicycles, windows, coffee shops: the poem moves through these and other constructions of the landscape and encounters the creatures, human and other, who live among them. The poem's meditative tone creates a calm into which deceptive or dangerous realities are always threatening to break. The observer is both separated from and entangled in the strangeness of place. "Every image falls short of a description of what's there, dusty green towel in the dirt, hawk overhead."