Is your retirement plan dying in the climate wars? Are you getting on with things in the meantime? In Life expectancy begins to fall, Tom Sastry asks how we normalise an apocalypse, taking us on a tour of bad coping strategies, unwelcome epiphanies, and striking reminders of what we still have.

Is your retirement plan dying in the climate wars? Are you getting on with things in the meantime? In Life expectancy begins to fall, Tom Sastry asks how we normalise an apocalypse, taking us on a tour of bad coping strategies, unwelcome epiphanies, and striking reminders of what we still have.

Part-elegy and part-satire, these poems do not show you what to do in a crisis, nor do they promote the cliches of positive thinking that tell you how to be a good worker, an effective activist or a spiritual person. Instead, quietly and persuasively, Sastry develops a subtle meditation on hope. The poetry shows us as we mostly are, lost in the enormity of it all and busy with other things. Explore a world where ‘pessimism is complicated by love’ and optimism is found hiding in moments where ‘nothing happens, in the most lavish way’.