Buy at Small Press Distribution
Published by Elixir Press, 2017
Winner of the 2015 Antivenom Poetry Award
In John Estes’s Sure Extinction, everything is up for grabs. It starts out with the inscription “A Hymn to Fate,” and it’s a particularly open fate, open hymn, that follows, where anyone’s life is, as he writes, “like yours . . . little / better than, or better for, moving a comma.” We’re inscribed by language, yes, he sees that, but it’s more than that, it’s the very way we imagine not just who we are, but what we can be, just as we define forever “as however long / it takes before you start / attaching prefixes.” It’s a frightening meditation, but it feels right to me. It feels spot on, because he keeps sight of the possibilities inherent in the mediations of language. “We are obliged to adapt,” he writes, and it’s exactly what we need to remember about the forms extinction can take, and their inevitability. —John Gallaher
I enjoyed turning every page and absorbing the accruing force of these poems, until I had a unified book in my hands. Sure Extinction displayed many moving parts, presented multiple questions of complexity. In the end, I enjoyed how this book illustrated that the scarcity of self-realisation can truly arrive and can be genuine. However one gets there, such is what makes every journey, trial, and pilgrimage worth it. —Nick Samaras, Contest Judge, from the Preface