Q&A for the End of the World is a new series of poems about science fiction movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s, including such classics as Godzilla and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Written alternately by the two authors, the book’s twenty poems act as a call-and-response for each movie. The poems address facets of film technique, pop culture, race, gender—as well as fears of nuclear war, dehumanization, and the “other”—with curiosity, skepticism, and affection.
Advance Praise:
“Two poets, one a lifelong sci-fi movie fan, the other new to the genre, engage in a literary conversation — a he-said-she-said about aliens and the apocalypse, teratology and time travel. The results are funny and fabulous, by turns startling and profound. In Q&A for the End of the World, Roberts and Gushue take a tag-team approach to the mysteries and delights of bygone B-movies and creature features (and one 28-minute French arthouse thriller). In the process, they harness the warped dream-logic of poetry to discover, in monster movies, some hidden yet familiar truths.”
—Michael O’Sullivan, film critic for the Washington Post
“This exploration of classic sci-fi films through poetry is as unique as each of the authors—one deeply committed to genre, and one to trying to understand the logic and appeal. The humorous and insightful back-and-forth is fun to digest, and begs the reader to re-watch these films with a new acumen.”
—Jon Gann, film producer
Reviews:
“In Q&A for the End of the World, D.C. area poets Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue grapple with the themes that permeate classic science fiction and horror films of the 1950s and ‘60s: the promises and threats of science and technology, personal and cultural identity, the rise of the surveillance state, will outer space aliens come to destroy or save us from ourselves. Though the tone is often humorous—especially when Roberts, initially a sci-fi skeptic, points out the improbabilities in the ‘science’ depicted in these films—an undercurrent of seriousness flows beneath the dialogue when one considers that the questions raised are still quite relevant for today.”
—Gregory Luce, Washington Unbound
“There’s…that larger conversation about the purpose of pop culture, the purpose of these kinds of cultural touchstones for serving as a mirror of the larger cultural obsessions, and the imagery that we…get imprinted with and how that affects us, how that affects our identity as Americans.”
—interview with Demitra Moutoudis, WWPH Writes
“An exciting new book of poems forms a dialogue between poets Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue: one new to the world of mid-20th century science fiction films and the other a longtime aficionado. This collection deconstructs as much as it delightfully reconstructs common sci-fi tropes: martyr vs. monster, lone scientist/doctor vs. government/army, threatened apocalyptic endings of the world. The book is a sequence of question and answer poems, the questions belonging to Roberts and the answers supplied by Gushue. In it, humor, social criticism, inventive language, and imagery contribute to a deeply pleasurable read.”
—Christina Daub, Barrelhouse Magazine
“To say that this collection of poetry is not your usual book of poetry would not do it justice…when faced with adversity or the horrors outer space, we turn to that which we cannot fathom completely: The Great Power of the Unknown.”
—Robert L. Giron, ArLiJo Magazine
“Perhaps inspired by the current state of the world, as we inch ever closer to doomsday (it’s 89 seconds to midnight, as of this writing), Roberts and Gushue conduct a literary question and answer period in poems that alternate between serious and silly, informative and informal, resulting in an otherworldly experience.”
—Gregg Shapiro, OutSFL
Q&A for the End of the World