Apocalypse, Darling

by Barrie Jean Borich

Overview

From award-winning author Barrie Jean Borich comes Apocalypse, Darling, a narrative, lyric exploration of the clash between old and new. Set in the steel mill regions of Chicago and in Northwest Indiana, the story centers on Borich’s return to a decimated landscape for a misbegotten wedding in which her spouse’s father marries his high school sweetheart. The book is a lilting journey into an ill-fated moment, where families attempt to find communion in tense gathering spaces and across their most formative disappointments. Borich tells the story of the industrial heartland that produced the steel that made American cities, but also one of the most toxic environmental sites in the world.
 
 
As concise as a poem and as sweeping as an epic novel, Apocalypse, Darling explores the intersection of American traditional and self-invented social identities and the destruction and re-greening of industrial cityscapes. Borich asks: can toxic landscapes actually be remediated and can patriarchal fathers ever really be forgiven? In a political climate where Borich is forced to daily re-enter the toxic wastelands she thought she’d long left behind, Apocalypse, Darling is an urgent collision of broken spaces, dysfunctional affections, and the reach toward familial and environmental repair. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814254622
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	01/30/2018
Series:	Machete Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Barrie Jean Borich is the award-winning author of Body Geographic and My Lesbian Husband. She is an Associate Professor of creative writing and publishing at DePaul University in Chicago, where she edits Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts.
 

 

Table of Contents

Part I Mixing Memory with Desire

Wasteland Oasis, Indiana 2008 3

Byway, Skyway, Illinois/Indiana 2008 4

His Not Daughter, Minneapolis 1987 6

Trouble, Chicago 1985 8

Best Man, Indiana 2008 10

Pink Lady, Minneapolis 2008 12

Swede in Our Shower, Minneapolis 1995 16

What's Present in Time Future I, Chicago 2015 17

Annihilation Pending, Minneapolis 1988 18

Visible Grace, Calumet, Illinois/Indiana 1950-present 20

Enter the Chapel, Indiana 2008 21

Part II In Which Sad Light

The Cruelest Month, Post-Industrial North 2008 25

Dune-ality, Indiana 1977 27

The Apocalypse, Darling, Interior Landscapes 1959- 29

The Bee-U-Tee-Full Old Country, Indiana 2008 30

Women's Work, North Suburban Chicago 1988 33

Swedish Italian, New Jersey/Michigan/Illinois 1960s 35

Don't Ask Don't Tell, Interstate 1980-2008 36

The Children's Crimes, According to the Father, as Imagined by the Daughter-in-Law He Does Not Acknowledge, Minneapolis 2008 38

What's Present in Time Future II, Chicago 2015 40

The Violet Hour, Indiana 2008 41

Part III Nothing with Nothing

The We Who, Indiana 2008 45

Unreal City, Minneapolis 1987-Yesterday 47

Lilacs Out of a Dead Land, Indiana 2008 49

Laquearia, Indiana 2008 51

O City, City, Minneapolis 2007 53

BurningBurning, Illinois or Indiana Mill Country, 20th or 21st Century 55

The Tattoo Merchant, Inside an Inaccurate Indiana Fantasy 2008 57

The Golf Course Nuptials, as Imprecisely Recalled with Undisguised Bias, and without Approval from Her Spouse, by the Daughter-in-Law the Groom Has Not Yet Acknowledged, Indiana 2008 59

Part IV What the Water Said

Shantih, Indiana 2009 65

Part V Fragments Against Ruins

Post-Nuptial, Indiana Golf Course 2008 71

Post-Apocalypse, The Rain, Indiana 2008 74

Post-Mortem, Re-Migrations 2008 76

Post-Traumatic, These Fragments We Shore 2008 79

What's Present in Time Future III, Chicago 2015 81

Post-Photographic, The Photographer's Reformation 2008 82

Post-Industrial Dunes, Memory and Desire 1976 and Now 84

Notes on the Text 87

Acknowledgments 91

About the Author 93

Editorial Reviews

“Lying down with Apocalypse, Darling reminds readers that lesbian books are a way of lying with women. Intimate. Important. Sensual. What happens when women lie with women? They read and write and tell stories that care for lesbians, for women, for the whole of creation.” —Lambda Literary

 


“Apocalypse, Darling is a wonderful addition to Barrie Jean Borich’s literary explorations of queer and Midwestern identities . . . with her exquisitely rendered, humane illuminations of the particulars of place and the multiplicities of family constellations.” —The Gay & Lesbian Review
 


“On one hand Barrie Jean Borich’s remarkable Apocalypse, Darling mucks up the neat divide between reclamation and ruin, laying waste to the old binaries. On another it’s a hilarious, playful, and deeply absorbing inquiry into what it might mean to be an American right now. This is timely, dazzling work. — Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship


“Few writers today can equal Barrie Jean Borich in channeling the unspoken languages of our culture, whether it’s a family wedding overseen by headless but eloquent plastic torsos, or the Gothic beauty of a landscape ‘capped by the granulated blue of a mill-punctured sky,’ or wedding guests like the author and her spouse, who remake themselves in the new cities of ‘the country of women’. This ‘narrative lyric’ uses its gorgeous lyricism to show us how, physically and psychically, every moment is a new country, each quietly burning with its own apocalypse.” —Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of Body Toxic and Make Me a Mother


“Apocalypse, Darling shows Barrie Jean Borich at her jazz-riffing, literary canon-busting best. Here, lustrous literary forms born of post-industrial wastelands are the grounds for seeing and being seen, remembering and reinventing. Borich’s apocalyptic love song is more bracing, more beautiful, and more real than current dystopias will ever allow: a queer ecology of mind.” —Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack


“Barrie Jean Borich delivers a time-tripping, probing biographic memoir about love and the hard-to-love, dysfunctional families and the new American family, and the almost poetic parallels between toxic relationships and America’s repatriated industrial wastelands.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune


“It is important to note the beautiful complexity of the book as it not only intertwines present with past, but also illuminates intricate connections between people and the land. . . . Can we change? Can we revive what was once peaceful and beautiful?” —New Pages

From the Publisher