Romantic Portrait of a Natural Disaster

If you're looking for a short-yet-compelling book of poetry relevant to the current state of the world, look no further. Romantic Portrait of a Natural Disaster is a chapbook-length collection of poems in which up-and-coming poet Hannah Cajandig-Taylor navigates what it means to live in a world that seems to always be ending. From images of mountain glaciers to cosmic odes and everything in-between, her work implores the reader to consider what happens when we are honest and vulnerable about the way in which we destroy both the world and ourselves.

Though many of these poems have been published in prominent literary journals, such as Pretty Owl Poetry, Sonora Review, and LandLocked Magazine, nearly two-thirds of these works are appearing in-print for the first time. This chapbook also contains Cajandig-Taylor's prose poem/hybrid piece "You as Apocalypse", which was nominated by Gordon Square Review for a Best Small Fictions award in 2019.

However, all of the poems in this book have three things in common: a desire to look to the clouds and constellations for escape, a desire to understand how things fall apart, and a desire to find hope in a world that constantly breaks. Furthermore, the underlying threads of anxiety, weather, astronomy, and nostalgia stitch these poems together into a beautiful and chaotic mess, in which we are urged to find something lovely in the darkest of places.