Suzannah Evans' debut collection Near Future is doom-pop-poetry with
an apocalyptic edge, a darkly humorous journey through sci-fi lullabies
and northern mysteries. This is a future simulation stripped of the
space-age gloss of progression - one where the robots have gone rogue
and the hopes of a new millennium are malfunctioning; this is a skewed
yet oddly familiar world gone uncannily wrong.
These playful, sharp, poems are also about more than dystopias and five
types of possible apocalypse - in looking at the worst-case scenarios,
Evans comes closer to the bigger narrative; universal truths of change,
whether man-made or natural, preventable of inevitable, and the
uncertain business of human existence where 'there are disasters that
you cannot prepare yourself for'. Evans brings a distinctive, skilful
and wonderfully peculiar roving eye to our restless and unpredictable
times.