Avoiding the Rapture

Avoiding the Rapture is a collection of poems about survival-surviving childhood, religion, and the ways girls are taught they should behave. Karen J. Weyant opens the Rust Belt to the reader and shows them what life is like there: hard and grizzly, but with hints of tenderness and hope. We meet troubled boys and adventurous girls, we meet the survivors of a difficult life, we meet those who are scraping by and those who aren't. This collection shows that even the difficult can be beautiful, that even the hard can contain softness. Ultimately, this collection shows the reader that to survive, one must be willing to fight for it, but if they do, they're rewarded with a lush and vibrant life.

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Karen J. Weyant dedicates Avoiding the Rapture, "to all the Rust Belt girls" who did as the title suggests: survived looming fear of physical bodies of the righteous ascending to heaven. Weyant distills, in expertly crafted, evocative verse, a splendidly defiant girlhood that comes in shirking that fear to embrace base yearning for pleasures like cigarettes, cool clothes, and flavored Chapstick. This collection is a Biblical masterpiece. It captures the loss and longing of survivorship. You, too, will feel the Rapturous pull out, but will want to stay here-just a little longer.

Sara Moore Wagner, author of Swan Wife and Hillbilly Madonna

Road map and field guide, Avoiding the Rapture documents a coming of age during the devastating effects of deindustrialization. Karen Weyant's poems reveal the hardscrabble existence of prescient girls who "smell water before the rain swells" surrounded by adults that "should have been listening." Among broken beer glass and roadkill, where the night sky is "splattered with rhinestones" and "the town river is thick brown, too dark to see," These are poems of compassion written with an unflinching gaze. A testament to survival, full of sharp edges and wonder, Avoiding the Rapture leaves no one behind. This is a remarkable debut.

Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star

The Rust Belt has already seen the rapture-several, in fact, and those left behind each time continue to tell new stories. In Karen J. Weyant's Avoiding the Rapture, we meet girls who've "lived among the dead" wearing craft store glitter and vanilla bean Chapstick, who've had to learn survival by listening to the river and looking for answers in the fields, whose indomitable spirits were forged where "god smelled like burned paper." Through stunning imagery and music, Weyant paints with the colors and textures of a post-industrial landscape that reflects more than simple nostalgia. This is poetry for anyone who knows that "when everyone disappears, everything you see will be yours," but only if you claim it.

Rochelle Hurt, author of The Rusted City and The J Girls: A Reality Show