Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City

A dedication to the transformative power of language itself defines Estes' Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City. These poems excavate Baudelairean correspondences -- secret relations in the world of things -- reveling in the ways that etymology uncovers the ancient life of language, even as the play and slippages of language access alternative modes of being.

In his poem "A Song on the End of the World," Czeslaw Milosz evokes an apocalypse that is grounded in the quotidian and intimate: "There will be no other end of the world." Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City enacts this intimate apocalypse as two women forge a "Song of the End of the World" that looks both backward and defiantly, improbably, forward.

Language in this work becomes a way of moving across, questioning time and culture. Somewhere between seduction and annihilation, between Pavlov and Pavlova (as one poem puts it), at the end of days, of light, what are the words we would want to speak?