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Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse: New and Selected Poems
"Shawn Pavey’s Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse: New and Selected Poems speaks to economic anxiety, late-stage capitalism, and the general perils facing America. In this collection, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits growl working-class tunes from a car stereo, while the speaker prays his vehicle will keep running. There are eulogies for some of America’s greats, including Alex Chilton and Lucille Clifton, and a general belief that music and literature can uplift us. Additionally, these poems offer a celebration of the natural world, especially in the fifth and final section, a beautiful contrast to the hyper-consumerism and 9-5 dread depicted in earlier pieces."-- https://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/s...
154 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
About the author
Shawn Pavey
6 books1 followerShawn Pavey has delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, bagged groceries, cut meat, laid sewer pipe, bussed tables, washed dishes, roofed houses, crunched numbers, rented cars, worked in hotels, worn an apron at Kinko’s, and been paid to write everything from résumés to music reviews. Currently, he earns a living as an Executive Recruiter in Mission, KS where he lives with his wife and two worthless but adorable cats. He is the author of Talking to Shadows (2008, Main Street Rag Press) and Nobody Steals the Towels from a Motel 6 (2015, Spartan Press), Co-founder and former Associate Editor of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal, and a former board member and officer of The Writers Place, a Kansas City-based literary non-profit. His poems, essays, and journalism appear in a variety of national and regional publications. He’s hosted poetry readings in bars, coffee shops, haunted houses, bookstores, libraries, front porches, seedy motel rooms, and abandoned warehouses. A graduate of the University of North Carolina’s Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Program, he likes his Tom Waits loud, his bourbon single-barrel, and his basketball Carolina Blue.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 16, 2019
Shawn Pavey is one of modern literature’s best kept secrets. His poems will be standard curriculum for lit students for generations to come. Part Waits, part Springsteen, with maybe a bit of Levine thrown in there, Pavey’s poetry mines the varied life of the all too often forgotten everyman. His poems deftly transcend categories, genres, and styles; Shawn Pavey is a genre unto himself. The underground literary scene has known this for decades, and now with Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse, the world can see the culmination of those decades of tireless dedication to the craft, and to the life. This collection of new and selected poems is Pavey’s much deserved greatest hits album, complete with plenty of new cuts to entice the diehards who’ve already purchased the back catalog. One might speculate that pulling from an existing library so strong, the new poems might be filler, but that is far from the case; the new poems arguably exceed the stellar success of the classics. If we are all students of life, then Shawn Pavey is the teacher, and we’d all do well to be quiet and listen. Full of heart, humor, and ultimately, truth, Survival Tips for the Coming Apocalypse is in no uncertain terms requisite reading for anyone who considers themselves a poet, or a fan of poetry, literature, or anyone who is interested in the truth that is at the heart of the matter we call life.
September 28, 2019
One of the most well-considered collections I’ve read in years and one I expect to return to when I need to touch the sublime. Letting his attention hone in on music, memory, workaday frustration, relationships, and always trying to move ahead (until that day you no longer can), Pavey displays a poetic craftsmanship and care for the everyday that humbles me.
February 29, 2020
Rather than write a review, I'll share the blurbs I wrote for Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse. I'll just say that I did not exaggerate for the sake of helping sales. I was a fan of Pavey's earlier books and couldn't believe how far this one leaped over his own high bar. Don't let the apocalypse word depress you. It's a well rounded, warm, often witty read. I gave him two choices, so I'll also let you have the option of whichever speaks to you the most.
Blurbs
When Shawn Pavey says, “I followed that line, / eyes forever to the horizon, / never losing sight of the point / where it all comes together,” he is reminiscing about childhood walks down railroad tracks, but he could equally be describing how his poetry works. This poetry collection achieves that goal of finding “where the separate become singular / …to be the one thing, whole.” The only way to
balance out even some of our planet’s horrors is to learn how to hope, laugh, love, and employ sarcasm whenever we need it to endure. If you need survival tips, Pavey’s a good man to heed.
or
Since you are reading a poetry blurb, you already know that life is a mixed bag. We can worry about a pending apocalypse while taking time to notice “even moonlight seems so still / you can almost touch it.” We can suffer the loss of loved ones and be deeply affected by the deaths of favorite writers, painters, or musicians, but not without elegizing how they have shaped us and the gifts they’ve left behind. Pavey is a keen observer who understands the poet’s job is to document life, with all its scattered contradictions, in order to see it as “the one thing, whole.” Why bother? “It matters. It has to.”
Blurbs
When Shawn Pavey says, “I followed that line, / eyes forever to the horizon, / never losing sight of the point / where it all comes together,” he is reminiscing about childhood walks down railroad tracks, but he could equally be describing how his poetry works. This poetry collection achieves that goal of finding “where the separate become singular / …to be the one thing, whole.” The only way to
balance out even some of our planet’s horrors is to learn how to hope, laugh, love, and employ sarcasm whenever we need it to endure. If you need survival tips, Pavey’s a good man to heed.
or
Since you are reading a poetry blurb, you already know that life is a mixed bag. We can worry about a pending apocalypse while taking time to notice “even moonlight seems so still / you can almost touch it.” We can suffer the loss of loved ones and be deeply affected by the deaths of favorite writers, painters, or musicians, but not without elegizing how they have shaped us and the gifts they’ve left behind. Pavey is a keen observer who understands the poet’s job is to document life, with all its scattered contradictions, in order to see it as “the one thing, whole.” Why bother? “It matters. It has to.”
January 19, 2022
Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse reads like the voices you remember hearing on the radio late at night. It sounds like a conversation over coffee at Waffle House at 3 A.M. In this collection, Shawn Pavey draws influences from musicians and poets alike. With refreshing humility, he is a regular guy with a remarkable ability to interpret the arts. He weaves his influences into a cohesive text. The first poem, “Autobiography: After Ferlinghetti,” kicks this collection off in true beat fashion. It’s an entertaining ramble full of one-liners. My personal favorite is, “I like it here and I won't go back where I came from because I can't decide where that is.” What follows are a series of recollections, unique to the poet yet strangely familiar to the rest of us. In “On Eastway and The Plaza,” Pavey recollects being a teenager at the fall fair in a small town. “Homecoming” describes a vacation at the beach with the poet’s insight stating “an ocean of first water ebbed saline over my skin.” This manuscript is a labor of love that has been buried and revised, published and edited until it became and more like an anthology than a book. It’s a diverse body of work with references that range from The Boss to Galway Kinnel, Alex Chilton to Gustav Holst. Survival Tips… is meant to be read and reread. It has a Midwestern twang set to a Southern beat (or vice versa). To quote the man himself, it’s the voice you hear “heading through the streetlight darkness towards home.”
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews