Suzannah Evans' debut collection Near Future is doom-pop-poetry with an apocalyptic edge, a darkly humorous journey through sci-fi lullabies and northern mysteries. This is a future simulation stripped of the space-age gloss of progression — one where the robots have gone rogue and the hopes of a new millennium are malfunctioning; this is a skewed yet oddly familiar world gone uncannily wrong.
These playful, sharp, poems are also about more than dystopias and five types of possible apocalypse — in looking at the worst-case scenarios, Evans comes closer to the bigger narrative; universal truths of change, whether man-made or natural, preventable of inevitable, and the uncertain business of human existence where 'there are disasters that you cannot prepare yourself for'. Evans brings a distinctive, skilful and wonderfully peculiar roving eye to our restless and unpredictable times.
