on Soft Apocalypse by Leah Nieboer

“ ‘Communication’ is a registry of modern longings,” writes media theorist John Durham Peters in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. “The term evokes a utopia where nothing is misunderstood, hearts are open, and expression is uninhibited.” Peters’ thesis offers one possible frame for reading Leah Nieboer’s debut poetry collection, Soft Apocalypse, a book that registers the swerves, deferrals, and near misses of sociality under the slow collapse of late capitalism. Soft Apocalypse dwells on the gaps in the communication network, marked by mediation, interference, distance, and longing. Yet Nieboer is equally invested in seeking a kind of utopia that flashes through these gaps, a flicker of queer futurity sparking at moments of unexpected contact. 

Structurally, the collection builds momentum by shifting between fragmented, lineated poems that slip their moorings and filmic, narratively compact prose poems that ground the book in uneasily vivid scenes of near-future anomie. These prose poems provide some spatial orientation for the reader by detailing the non-places of everyday life: homogenous sites like interstate highways, drainage ditches, parking lots, subway systems, and “busted-up tennis courts.” At the same time, the cinematic stage sets in these prose poems exist in a compelling tension with the overlapping voices we hear off screen—voices which fade in and out and are often difficult to pin to a particular speaker. The opening poem in the collection sets this precedent:

A job as an understudy, a flower from the hardware store, a nickel for example is easy. I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. . . . A diorama of the room affords only a secondhand sofa, a proposal (juked), a view of all those happy girls pressed up against the walls in the violeted light. I’m yours, too, Anonymously—

Here, the italicized lines vibrate in an ambiguous space between dialogue, quotation, and epistolary address. Nieboer resolves some of this ambiguity in the endnotes by attributing one of these lines to Simone Weil and explaining that the prose poems take their titles from Clarice Lispector’s 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H. In the context of Soft Apocalypse’s utopic project, we might read the polyvocal sound effects and commitment to intertextuality as strategies for constructing a more expansive social space by inviting other voices into the poem.

However, the mere presence of multiple voices does not guarantee communication or unmediated expression. The prose poem vignettes in Soft Apocalypse tend to depict moments of alienation or communication failure. Memorably, in “GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST,” the speaker describes how “one year I wrote love letters, 156, to complete strangers then abruptly gave them up.” A gesture that begins as an intimately poetic form of unproductive expenditure succumbs to the structural exhaustion of modern life. Even when two bodies are present in the same space, they tend to turn away from each other as if magnetically repulsed. For example, in “RELEASED FROM THE NECESSITY OF APOLOGY,” Nieboer renders a domestic Sunday morning scene as “bare feet leaving rhythmic traces in the torn light, voices driven to the remotest corner of the room.” 

On the other hand, in her longer lineated poems, Nieboer breaks her lines into molecular units of phrase and image, creating a sensation of perpetual motion. Compared to the somewhat claustrophobic prose poems, the lineated poems are more porous, letting other voices in at the risk of crosstalk, noise, and interference. The prose poems do this too, but the short, enjambed lines intensify these moments of signal-jamming. Nieboer foregrounds communication failures through repeated references to mediation, whether radio static, crackle on a worn record, or “a dial tone hanging / somewhere / waylaid, interrupted.” 

Beneath their surface noise, these technologies carry other voices while preserving an unnerving sense of ambiguity between crosstalk and conversation. In “FORECLOSE ME,” for example, an oblique reference to a pay phone creates a channel for two voices. However, the second voice seems to talk past the speaker, interrupting rather than responding. Communication short-circuits, and in the process, the poem collapses the body into currency to underscore the expendability of human life under capitalism:

Although there are many examples throughout the collection, “FLASH PROCESSING OF A PRIVATE YEAR” offers the most compelling and sustained reflection on the relationship between embodiment and mediation. The poem unspools at the juncture between illness and miscommunication. Between scenes of pharmacy lines and exam rooms and the speaker’s micro-attention to the body’s “barely audible pulmonics,” Nieboer fuses physiology and recording media and attends to the glitches in both. Speech coagulates into a physical medium, with “the mouth the mouth full of // hopelessly tangled cassette tape.” In another scene that evokes a medical examination, pain causes semantically stable language to dissolve into something like a phonetic reflex:

Of course, in this discussion of noise and interference, it’s worth acknowledging that poetry is not reducible to communication. It simultaneously exceeds this horizon of informational exchange and falls short. Noise is poetic (or poetry is noisy), in the sense that the listener has to do some interpretive work to turn it into a signal. Importantly, instances of noise in Soft Apocalypse are not just communication failures, but they also signal modes of being outside of the smoothly managed, efficient encounters of neoliberal capitalism. Against the sterility of life-destroying capitalism, Nieboer reframes noise as a residue of life, like in “SPACE WITHOUT MAP”:

Here, the poem echoes and deforms John Cage’s famous adage (“something is always happening that makes a sound”) to figure noise as a by-product of the body’s quotidian desires and drives. These incidental noises mark the presence of the other and create opportunities for moments of strange intimacy to emerge stochastically. Something like this happens in “MINOR EVENTS 3,” where neighborly noise makes porous the well-regulated, relentlessly individualizing units of the apartment block:

In moments like this, poetry is overheard, literally. Soft Apocalypse shows us that while the standard channels of communication consistently fail, it’s in the noises, leakages, and palimpsests where new collectivities and fugitive socialities can emerge. Here, we arrive at the collection’s utopic futurism. As Nieboer’s endnotes reveal, José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia helps to anchor this collection. Citing Roland Barthes, Muñoz makes the case that “the utopian is an impulse that we see in everyday life. This impulse is to be glimpsed as something that is extra to the everyday transaction of heteronormative capitalism.” Nieboer’s poem “DREAM OF A SENSIBLE FACTORY” turns Muñoz’s claim into a manifesto, imagining a factory where the workers are not alienated from their product, which is sociality. Time is unregulated, goods go unsold, and “it isn’t loud, anyone could talk themselves / into a surprise, a purplish exchange.” 

The poem also offers a counterpoint to the communication failures from earlier sections. In the “sensible factory,” communication is guided not by an ethos of efficiency, but shared affects and mutual understanding:

to be understood, we practice inflating and deflating the lungs

in synchronized fashion, our labor

furling, coming together

extralinguistically—

This gorgeous moment of synchronized breathing seems to extend forever, beyond the horizon of the crushing present outside the factory walls. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz writes that “[q]ueerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world.” Soft Apocalypse launches on a trajectory of ecstatic horizontality, sending “sound waves, a kiss, a compass, a forward oscillation / into the desert like a love letter.” Nieboer’s collection makes me reflect on how poetry does this too, in the way that it addresses unseen readers across time. Even if we can’t be certain that a receiver exists, the “softness” of this apocalypse comes in the impulse to transmit, to vibrate sympathetically, to get in contact. 

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Soft Apocalypse. By Leah Nieboer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. 106 pp. $19.95.