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The Denver poet breaks down a piece in her new book,
Poems for the End of the World.Angela Ufheil •
Suzi Q. Smith’s new book,
Poems for the End of the World, may seem like a macabre manifesto born from the pandemic. But the Denverite wrote many of the verses in 2019, responding to earlier global and personal upheaval: The Amazon rainforest was on fire, her daughter was headed to college, and Smith had recently left her position as executive director of nonprofit Poetry Slam Inc., which shuttered soon after. “I was spending time in gardens and thinking about how the world continues on, even after change or catastrophe,” she says. That theme echoes through one of the few COVID-19-inspired pieces, “Mezzo Sopranos Get the Sad Songs,” to appear in Smith’s book, out this month. We asked her to break down the poem for us.