Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last

“Justin Boening’s lines consistently elude our expectations, but somehow encourage and fulfill them in doing so. Surprise is a recurring texture throughout these shimmering poems, and no wonder, when ‘we changed our laws as often as our laws allowed.’ Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last is a stunning achievement.”

“An emotionally rich, intellectually sharp gospel … Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last announces the arrival of a poet—inheritor, it seems to me, of Mark Strand and John Ashbery—who may be our generation’s own skeptical spiritualist… . Boening’s seems a skepticism only the most faithful could possess, a doubt that provides the constitutive backing of belief. I’m moved, time and again, by the depth of feeling in these poems, by a sincerity that’s never saccharine or simplistic, and by Boening’s ability to articulate spiritual desolation in ways that feel fresh and engaging… . A lustrous debut written by a poet who already, it seems, possesses the wisdom and spiritual depth of a much more established writer.”

“Justin Boening is capable of a remarkable music of longing, and sometimes a music of the flailing and fantasy that screen for longing. Aside from Kafka, I sense kinship with Mark Levine’s cracked landscapes, Mark Strand’s serene self-effacement, and Lucie Brock-Broido’s extravagant menagerie.”  

“Justin Boening’s work is fearless, self-deprecating, ironic, sublime, heartbreaking, and beautifully wrought. His poems have a way of taking you off guard, of taking you from a real world of ‘celestial certitudes’ through a wilderness where the other world hangs in a ‘museum / of what is not there,’ a world of buskers and strangers, of fortunetellers, of a family gone wrong and a mother gone sour. There are many shadows, and many shades from a curdled past. His muse is an afterlife he swears by, but it is, likewise, one he swears cannot possibly exist. This book has a way of having its way with you, and you like it, you surrender to it. Boening asks, in this marvelous first collection, ‘Is there another world? Is it this one?’ You answer: Yes. It is. It is this one.”

“Wild, lush, and dreamy … A book that gives pleasure, a visceral sensation that starts somewhere in the chest and ripples down to the feet… . Justin Boening’s poems are ancient, mystic, sometimes wry, and always ardent. I will be returning to this book often, to spend time in the places these poems have built, to spend time with this speaker at the ends of the earth.”

“Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last is a book of vividly dreamlike Freudian meditations and parables. There’s a wry fatalism throughout the collection as Justin Boening leans toward an acceptance of mortality and, more importantly, our basic human capacity for failure—but there’s also a quiet playfulness that emerges from inside the traps these poems make. I found myself consistently astonished and thrilled by their ability to reverberate in many directions at once, articulating elemental human paradoxes and needs in ways that feel vital and engaging and new.”