Last Days

Last Days is a poetic practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises.

It excavates the conditions that have brought us to this moment—white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, corporate power, and capitalism. It explores how we might transform these conditions to usher in a future that is more beautiful, more just, and more loving than we can even imagine. The poems call on ancestors, birds, organizers, and love to conjure the “bricks and mortar” of this new world. It is an offering to all of us who need to ground in our power so we can do the work of transforming our world.

Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry

Learn more about my radical experiment to launch this book.

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"At a time when we are moving so fast we forget to breathe, Last Days asks us to stop, to think, to see. These poems examine the joy of struggle and the interconnectedness of all things, dissolving the borders between nature and humanity and past and present. To those who have been in the fight a long time, who are tired, who want to rest, and who want to win, these are vital, nourishing, life-giving words.”

Ai-jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Director of Caring Across Generations
“At this moment in history, a singular question often arises: what happens to the self and to the group when a keen part of ourself is the Other? Tamiko Beyer allows the question to be complex because, for her, even being human has its Otherness. In the phrase 'slip // of boundaries' ('Estuaries'), we are introduced early in the collection to a staff that may assist in climbing into and along with these gorgeous poems, some of which 'slip' form from Western open verse to authentically realized haiku and haibun. The slip is also identity from mixed race to queer to class to human; the slip is language as well as poetics—especially for those in Japanese forms; and it is that abiding psychological Freudian slip. (And perhaps, a female garment, given Beyer’s playfulness!) And, then there is location, whether subterranean or alternate. Enter into this collection of Last Days and enjoy powerful discoveries in her crossings and lines.”

Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies
“Spare language. Exactly the right words. Ancestors meet corporations, haibun meets words that form paragraphs. That which is wild. That which has been controlled. That which is intimate, personal, specific. That which tells the truth of violence as a cultural; a national practice. Tamiko Beyer’s poetry is an experiment in revolution, a place where poem and embodiment are the same. A murmuration, a flood, an anchor in the mud. These are poems that whisper to your bones.”

Susan Raffo
With each read, we are taken by this story’s necessary vision of the future and what it reflects of the present. This is more than an apocalypse story—it is composite and collage, a new way of storytelling that blurs all lines between ‘poem’ and ‘prose’ and ‘essay.’ This is unnerving in the way genre-bending work should be. It reflects and refracts the end of the world.

Chris Burke, 2018 BWR Fiction Editor, & Cat Ingrid Leeches, 2018 BWR Editor, on “Last Days, Part 1”, winner of the 2019 Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers from PEN America

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