A Feeling Called Heaven

A Feeling Called Heaven is a logical reminder of our looming extinction, but with a peaceful sense of community, not a panic. If ever you begin to feel uneasy about a sudden apocalypse or slow decline, this steady poetic heartbeat will calm your nerves and almost make you look forward to our collective harmonious finale.

A Feeling Called Heaven introduces the possibility of a queer future now, through the death of the self by way of poetry, which is inherently communal. Through expert attention to the present, Yearous-Algozin’s poetics push us forward, towards the end of the world, towards a feeling called heaven.

While the apocalypse itself feels foreboding, this long poem underscores the joy of the world’s persistence… A Feeling Called Heaven offers a hopeful refusal of the apocalyptic depression that accompanies many poems on the environment.

Yearous-Algozin has written a book that offers a nullification of the creative process, an anti-inspiration to take the pause and escape the creative act; unlike any other book I have read, A Feeling Called Heaven positions itself as a rational counterpoint to tangible production and artistry.

Listen to the audiobook of A Feeling Called Heaven, as read by Diana Hamilton!

A Feeling Called Heaven exists somewhere between dream, irony and ecopoetic anti-capitalist treatise (not unlike Ryan Fitzpatrick’s 2023 collection Sunny Ways). Formally, the collection reads as a very long poem (under the heading ‘for the second to last time’) followed by a shorter long poem (‘a closing meditation’), and it fixates on what it seems all contemporary poets are required to reckon with in their work: impending apocalypse and humanity’s role therein.