Barrelhouse Reviews: Q&A for the End of the World by Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue
Reviewed by Christina Daub
WordTech Editions / February 2025 / 64 pp
An exciting new book of poems forms a dialogue between poets Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue: one new to the world of mid-20th century science fiction films and the other a longtime aficionado. This collection deconstructs as much as it delightfully reconstructs common sci-fi tropes: martyr vs. monster, lone scientist/doctor vs. government/army, threatened apocalyptic endings of the world. The book is a sequence of question and answer poems, the questions belonging to Roberts and the answers supplied by Gushue. In it, humor, social criticism, inventive language, and imagery contribute to a deeply pleasurable read.
What unfolds in this chain of call and response poems between the two friends is a lyric conversation. (Frankly, I wished it had continued beyond just twenty poems.) The book opens with Gushue assessing that the end of the world will be a day like any other day. He notes that we’ve been looking for “telltale signs” of such an ending for the past 75 years: strange skies, UFOs, zombies, monstrous creatures rampaging through cities, and yes, dramatic climate change. The timing of this book is apt. Is a world wipeout by a virus any less fanciful than annihilation by alien invasions?
During the post-World War II era, fear of nuclear annihilation and/or fallout and effects of radiation inhabited the zeitgeist. The possibility of other life forms took hold of the American imagination in dramatic ways. Science fiction flourished at the drive-in, creating a significant body of films for study by historians and poets alike. And Hollywood discovered a new form of entertainment: a dystopian cinema of mind-controlled futures and treacherous mutations.
The poems cover nine films, including an influential French short film, La Jetée (1962). Each movie has two poems dedicated to it: Roberts’ wonderings and musings coupled with Gushue’s attempts to add context and enlighten. The results are by turns both hilarious and profound.
Regarding The Thing from Another World (1951), a film in which the protagonist proclaims knowledge to be more valuable than human life, Roberts asks Gushue why there is always a martyr. She queries, “will we descend / to our baser selves again or learn / fright is our true foe? Can we ever truly learn / there are no enemies in science?” Gushue responds, “Welcome to the 1950s, where fear, / not science, unites us…” and more importantly, “After the Thing’s reduced to ash, we’re left / with knowing how easy our displacement / is, how close our obsolescence might be.” One need not have seen the film to appreciate the absurdity of a Nobel prize winner trying “to reason with a potato intent on drinking men’s blood and taking over the world.”
When the poets discuss The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Roberts zeroes in on Patricia Neal’s character. She quips, “we're certain this day can't end well / when Patricia Neal has to memorize that well- / known phrase: Klaatu barada nikto.” Having now seen several of these 50s sci-fi films, she asks, “why is there always a soldier or cop too quick to pull a trigger?” “The earth stands still,” replies Gushue, because “we are terrified of moving.”
From the ridiculous to the sublime, each set of poems evolves the conversation further, from musings on period pieces to existential questions both stirring and absurd. From Godzilla’s “Fibonacci-spikes glow[ing] red with fury” to the “bubbles and blebs” of the Blob, that “unstoppable glob, / a malevolent gel,” this collection is a romp through alternative universes.
The 1950s sci-fi film cycle is as rife with imagination as it is with fear of the unknown, the latter of which loomed large in a post-atomic world. In the final poem of Q&A for the End of the World, a closer by Roberts, she tells us she’s learned that “our best hopes / lie with men with the squarest jaws.” Then, echoing the scare tactics of many films in the cycle, she observes that “we must never reveal our fear. / Fear / is just another word for vigilance.”
Christina Daub is both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated poet whose work can be found in several anthologies and literary journals including The Connecticut Review, The Cortland Review, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Shō Poetry Journal, Stone Circle Review among others. She co-founded The Plum Review, its reading series and annual retreats, and has taught poetry and creative writing at The Writer’s Center, George Washington University and various other schools in the DC area. Her work has been translated into Russian, German and Italian. Find her at on bluesky @christinadaub.bsky.social or at christinadaub.com.