A Feeling Called Heaven (excerpt)

Joey Yearous-Algozin

this feeling called heaventhis pleasure in knowingthat though we’ve poisoned the earthit will continue without usviolence lesseningas it expresses itselffinally free of our guiding handthe return to a balanceor quietnesswe imagine existed before usand as this violence is expressedin progressivelymore minor waysas the center dissolvesimaginewhat we would’ve once called atmosphereI want you to rememberthat this violence no longer has a subjectthat the real utopiaour collective deathoffers the worldis only found in our own dissolutionand as our violence continues without usas a factneeding no witnessesit asks nothing of usand yetwe can’t separate ourselves from itso this violence and our part in it are expressedas waitingor more accuratelya passivity that refuses participationbeyond the minimum effort of remaining presentfor our end approaching far in the distanceaware that what we’re waiting foris simply uscome againthere’s nothing leftbut ruins yet to be madewe’re simply that which has yet to fall apartall that’s necessary is to construct the altarfor the altar to disappear

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Joey Yearous-Algozin is the author of A Feeling Called Heaven (Nightboat Books), Utopia, and the multi-volume The Lazarus Project, among others. With Holly Melgard, he has co-authored a trilogy of books Holly Melgard’s Friends and Family, White Trash, and Liquidation. He is a founding member of the publishing collective, Troll Thread. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

New York, New York

“Bardo, purgatory, whatever imagined place after we die, this is not that poetry; this is the work to get us there. We are arriving, together, with a last glimpse at the accomplished destruction, following the poet’s lantern, surrendering to the next transmutation. You who are reading this blurb, I may not know you, but I know you will take a final breath, and I am grateful to Joey Yearous-Algozin for reminding me of this about you and me.”
—CAConrad

“In A Feeling Called Heaven, Joey Yearous-Algozin holds us close as he guides us, slowly, calmly, to face the calamity of our life, creating a sense of safety in a space that is anything but safe. His soothing voice invites us not just to bear, but rather to see that at the heart of our forever ongoing demise, there is a possibility, no, an urgency, to come together and make space—for breath, for care, for caress, for our humanness that is ‘therefore / the most loveable / or deserving of love.’”
—Poupeh Missaghi

“Joey Yearous-Algozin’s A Feeling Called Heaven is a guided meditation that eases us, unwitting, into the thrum of human failing, the steady beat of doom. But nothing like the raving lunacy of a cult leader or apocalyptic town caller, Yearous-Algozin lures us into the logic of inevitable extinction with the tender transience of communal affect, the humor of quotidian decay. Warp of plastic made holy, celery at the grocery store damp with cosmic grief; A Feeling Called Heaven is a mantra for those enlightened of the urge towards survival, a text against hope, against heroism and memorialization in favor of the insignificance of our presence in this wretched world. And yet; there is comfort too, in how my lips move in sync. In the torqued vortex of friendship as we circle the drain of this late capitalist void—and what’s invoked; so much more than our insipid fantasies of the future. Because here we are, now, together. Because it’s the end and I believe in nothing. Except you.”
—Trisha Low

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