The Next World

by Christien Gholson

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The Next World explores the grief, anger, horror and illumination found on the border between the world as it is now and the one it is evolving into in the wake of climate change catastrophes. These poems wrestle with the difficulty of acknowledging a myriad of endings: species, places, but also the fundamental seasonal and environmental cycles that humans have always known. Simultaneously they explore what regeneration, hope, and “the future” might mean for us now. These poems allow for confusion, for questions, finding the beauty within the terror and revealing the terror inside the beauty.

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-962082-43-3 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2024951871

Copyright: 2025; Released January 28, 2025

94 pages

Author Biography

Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including Absence : Presence (Shanti Arts Publishing) and All the Beautiful Dead Along the Side of the Road (Bitter Oleander Press); along with a novel: A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Several chapbooks can be found online, including Tidal Flats (Mudlark). He attended Naropa University; University of California, Davis; and Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Banyan Review, Ecotone, Flyway, Hotel Amerika, Mudlark, Permafrost, The Shore, The Sun, and Tiger Moth Review, among many other literary journals, and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. He works as a somatic-oriented mental health counselor at a clinic collective. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is engaged in an endless dialogue about birth and death with a local murder of crows. christiengholson.blogspot.com

Endorsements

“Read the poems in Christien Gholson’s new book, The Next World. Breathe them deeply in. Live with them awhile. They are, in a word, ‘oracular’—all the proof I require that Gholson himself is that rare thing, a latter-day ‘technician of the sacred.’ Amen.”
—William Slaughter, editor of Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics; author of Untold Stories and The Politics of My Heart

“These are poems of revelation—tarantulas, ferns, a ruined house, bees, parasites, sea lions, ancestors. Realms of the living and dead disappear and re-appear, and often it is impossible to tell which is which. Elegant and surprising, Gholson’s poems help construct a self in a rapidly devolving landscape marked by war and disaster. Language itself, and the present moment, serve as a kind of antidote to despair. The poems in The Next World don’t boast that they are redemptive, but they are.”
—Miriam Sagan, author of Thanks for Stopping By

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