Extinction Song
Poetry
Tupelo Press, 2026
$19.95, 35 pages ISBN: 9781961209558
There is little doubt that humanity is killing Earth’s wildlife and destroying its wild places, and John James’s most recent collection, Extinction Song, provides a space from which not to simply observe this calamity but bring voice to how it feels within the circle of living and loss while touching on the cost of this clarity. James reveals how it feels to exist in this unique moment in time, when the climate is on the edge of disaster, with as much literal realism as can be sustained. Lines like “Each night I lay / the children down to sleep. / Each day, the sun / explodes. Magma surges” (James 13) and spherical patterns—the circle, the cycle—are constant companions throughout the work, bridging the rhythms of ordinary life with the seemingly-everlasting and unchanging experience of the living.
“…still the worm turns...” (James 10)
“The world revolves...” (James 11)
“The totality of things has always been just as it is now.” (James 22)
This collection places the current man-made mass extinction event as an inheritance and uses it as a backdrop in an emotional atmosphere that is unembellished and sincere, sharing an (at times) overwhelming awareness of what is happening to the planet with simple, grounded observations. James’s choice to use short lines, often only a few words long, mirrors the experience of living in modern society; the quick movement demands attention, pushes us to keep moving. But it also highlights how small scenes reveal a deeper part of our uncomfortable place in a fracturing reality. Little moments matter greatly in our understanding of humanity within the global ecosystem—as does each word, each turn of phrase, in James’ work. They deserve space and contemplation.
Through a diversity of visual layouts (James explores several, including spherical architecture with the poem “Infinite Gyre of Possible Ends”), the thirteen poems ask: During this unheard-of, record-breaking, history-making climate disaster, what do we feel everyday? What do we see when we close our eyes? How do we live?
In thirty, fifty, one hundred years, when people ask this of our time, Extinction Song will be one clear note of revelation in their search. It shows through the lens of new parenthood, suburbia, and quiet dread, many of us (though not all) watched our kids explore new curtains while thinking of burning oaks. We sang, danced, wrote, and painted on the edge of polluted and destroyed environments. We saw poison in our food and ate it anyway.
The collection does not hide the world’s imperfections or project the non-human wild as calm, organized, and compassionate. On the contrary, these poems are plump with lines like, “There is the mantis that cradles / the head of a wasp, gorging / on its neural curve...” (James 13). With moments like, “I’ve failed / to apply protective lotion” (James 11), the audience is not allowed to forget that our situation is not as simple as hell or heaven, danger or safety. The world has always called for protection. For us to survive we must be vigilant. James dares to admit that nature both hurts and helps—like an ambivalent watcher—yet it is something to be cherished all the same.
Moreover, people are not simply villains in an epic tale. The few times he explicitly addresses humanity, he writes that we are a “dapper and intelligent” (James 8) species and notes without judgement his own children’s destruction of nature (decapitating dandelions) and their sole focus on what comforts them most (curtains, patterned sheets).
Reading Extinction Song is like looking into a reflection pool that strips our daily rituals to their essence—watching news we don’t trust, spending evenings in solitude, checking the “empty polysyllables” (James 30) of an ingredients list, while plastics, preservatives, and dyes linger on our minds. It speaks to a universal understanding: while we check boxes for daily existence—work, eat, progress—somewhere things “dissolve... go... burn” (James 5), and these things are worth treasuring, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Perhaps this work is a backward path to relief, for what is poetry if not the tool to package unfiltered thoughts, dreams, and nightmares—and transport them to another who, without any other shared connection, has felt, dreamed, and feared the exact same? Maybe poetry is most urgent for moments like these, moments of inescapable pain, clarity of decay, and recognition that existing now is a “sunken version of dissent” (James 24). I believe James brings a truth to paper—we stand on the ledge mentioned in the first poem: “I tread the precipice of the abyss” (James 3).
But Extinction Song is proof that we are all standing there together.