To Be Read in 500 Years

By Albert Goldbarth

Book Overview

So often (let's be honest here) we poets
will invent dreams, for our own strategic purposes.
But this one is real, and one of the few
I remember. I awoke in the future.
--from "Mailbox"

To Be Read in 500 Years is the poet Albert Goldbarth's time capsule for a future that none of us can now imagine--a world without mailboxes, without sexual reproduction, without oil or tillable soil, without the capacity to understand music or poetry or "love love love love crazy love." Goldbarth's smart and nostalgic collection of poems, spoken from that future's distant past, reminds us of everything we have to lose.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555975259
• ISBN13: 9781555975258
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A hypothetical future without sexual reproduction, oil, fertile farmland, or even the virtue of love

Written by experienced poet and two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Albert Goldsmith, To Be Read in 500 Years is an anthology of free-verse poetry representing the past of a shocking imaginary future. Offering a glimpse into how this hypothetical future without sexual reproduction, oil, fertile farmland, or even the virtue of love came to be, To Be Read in 500 Years is as much cautionary tale as it is evolving poetic narrative. "How Simile Works": The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys / of some city; / and the brickwork back / of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise / they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo".... // The taste of our squabbles still in my mouth / the next day; / and the brackish puddles sectioning / the street one morning after a storm.... // So poetry configures its comparisons.