-273.15

After mapping Britain’s national decline over thirty years through 25 books of poetry, Peter Reading reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st-century work. The bitter social critic became poetry’s Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world’s wildlife and environment. -273.15 [absolute zero] was his first new collection since his three-volume Collected Poems. The book is a lament, a tirade, a disaster warning, and an anthropologist’s catalogue of our final expedition addressed to an earlier survivor of global catastrophe, Noah of the Flood. He published his final collection, Vendange Tardive, in 2010.