Kyle McCord’s What to Do in a Time of Impending Doom is a paradox of order and chaos, calm and horror, domestic bliss and terror. These brilliant poems vacillate between these dualities creating a palpable tension that helps us navigate the world, a world undone by pandemics, fake news, and manipulators. But we realize—finally—that it is intimacy, family, and the love of self that will help us all survive this madness and find “the good in this world.”

—Paul Brooke, author of Pantagruelian and The Skáld and the Drukkin Tröllaukin.

In What to Do in a Time of Impending Doom, Kyle McCord forges a poetics of social justice that is at once ambitious in scope and deeply personal. What’s so refreshing about this collection, though, is the way McCord addresses social issues head-on while at the same time offering the complexity and purposeful ambiguity that is missing from much of contemporary discourse. McCord is an exciting and necessary voice in contemporary poetry. Bravo!

—Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar and author of Daylight Has Already Come: Selected Poems