Leah Nieboer's stunning debut collection of poems . . . captures the visceral experience of a body--cosmically alone, contending with illness, often on the move--as her dislocated speaker passes through a series of fractured sites and shadowed scenes. . . . Soft Apocalypse draws a glowing and mysterious world where 'sad' and 'solitary' are not cause and effect, but words too small, too one-dimensional for the consciousness written here.--Jason Labbe "Colorado Review"
embodies a distinct, cohesive sense of hope and companionship that ties together the vivid, bright pink 'beloveds'--Nieboer's characters--in her poems.--Emma Y. Miao "The Harvard Crimson"
As a poet, process and effort are endlessly engaging for the impossibility we encounter--the task, that is, of writing what it is to be. I don't know how she did it, really, but Leah Nieboer's Soft Apocalypse makes distance intimate. Hers is a world simultaneously made and unmade, rendered in dimensions unimaginable. I find I do not want to leave. All around 'language allowing little detours.' Sentence as sentience. Paragraphs approaching but refusing summation, as sound and syntax both complicate and continue to thread the song buried deep underground. An experiment, yes! Nothing cold about it, no! This is 'the heart doing its best.' I will keep this book close to me. You should read these poems to see what I mean.--Sally Keith "author of River House: Poems"
Dancing inside 'the discoed light' of our late, lurid century, Leah Nieboer adroitly imbricates the private and political, minor events with macro catastrophe. At once ascetic and raptured by excess, Soft Apocalypse auditions social, civic, and erotic relationships that aspire to redress the alienations inflicted by capitalism. Set somewhere between Oklahoma and Ophiuchus, this 'triple-X rock opera' is scored to an ultraviolet dream stream and an 'EKG going off.' Its frayed-wire lyrics, neo-noir prose, and exquisite sequencing are cut with an X-Acto knife, fused with acetylene. Conversing with Lispector, Weil, and other intimate strangers, Nieboer accompanies us toward a future where, if we're unlikely lucky, 'a wreck becomes an opening.'--Andrew Zawacki "author of Unsun: f/11 and Videotape"
In Soft Apocalypse we find 'cold little gasps of misinformation;' we find 'mismatched confessionals.' In Leah Nieboer's spirited poetry, we discover a kaleidoscopic interpretation of the real, an unending disruption to thought constantly turning where anything is possible so that nothing is impossible. It's a bumpy ride and necessarily so.--Peter Gizzi "author of Now It's Dark: New Poems"