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The Handyman's Guide to End Times
Poems
First Place Winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award for Poetry, One Author, in English
In Morales's newest collection, an imagined zombie apocalypse intertwines with personal narrative. From zombie dating to the sin of popcorn ceilings, these poems investigate the nature of impermanence while celebrating the complexities of life.
Juan J. Morales is also the author of The Siren World and Friday and the Year That Followed: Poems.
"Above all, this is a timely collection. It is something I feel the contemporary poetry community sorely needs--a personal collection that still reaches for the universal, a collection that captures a particular generational experience . . . that is lacking in our current cultural milieu."--Michael Rather, Jr., Concho River Review
"Always he [the speaker in the poems] approaches the chaos that is his life with an abiding sense of humor and resourcefulness."
--Strange Horizons
"These poems are imbued with the work of trying to understand the histories of broken things like unions, selves, homes, pasts. They carry strategies for survival even as they document crisis and loss."--Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia: Poems
"These poems are filled with energy and velocity and are at once intimate and grand. Smart, sharp, and intimate, Morales is a truly gifted writer."--Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them
"These words are words we've always had inside but never been able to say, and this house coming together in these pages, we can live in it for a while."--Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels: A Novel
I. Demolition
The Long Engagement
A Prayer for Safe Travels
Wishes and Dinosaurs
The Zombie Sisyphus Dream
My Eco-Crimes
One Last Love Poem
Ghost Songs
Secret Maintenance
Mixtape Ghazal
Turf War
La Ranchera
Across the Overrun States
Poco a Poco
The Cemetery on the Outskirts
Leaving the Carnival
Living the Moth Apocalypse
Self-Portrait of Handyman Sanding Floors
Eating Habits
Leaving the First House
How to Dismantle a Mirror
II. Reanimation
Your New Haunted House
My Mother's Daily Phone Calls
Driving to Albuquerque
Teaching the Zombie How to Human Again
Death of an Appliance
Night Watch
Scraping the Popcorn Ceiling
Children Playing with a Cannonball
Breaking the Rules of the Zombie Flick, I
Handyman Checks for Alligators in the Sewer
You Are Not a Plumber
Passive Aggressive
Breaking the Rules of the Zombie Flick, II
The Monster behind the Bushes
Alone on the Oregon Trail
Inside an Hour
Breaking the Rules of the Zombie Flick, III
Homecoming
Fourth of July
Perfume
Handyman Spray-Painting Inside
Nuestra Curandera
Standing against the Trees
III. Inhabitation
My First Zombie
I Could Be So Lucky
With No End in Sight
Standing on Top of the Interchange
Thinking about Duchamp's Urinal
Our Hieroglyphics
Handyman Imagines the Battle of Pueblo
Like Teens
You and Me in the Zombie Flick
Watching the Paint Dry
The Great Flood
Jellyfish
Boy Scouts vs. Zombies
Explaining Seafood to My Future Grandkids after the Extinction
Rips
To the Kissing Lovers in the Vancouver Riots, 2011
The Stars Are Always Pretty on This Drive
Praise for a Finished Job
Ecuadorian Couplets
To Dream in Spanish
My Love for You
For the Tiled Floor
We Kept Meeting
Z Harmony
Acknowledgments