Abstract

Midtribulation is an attempt at grappling with “apocalypse” as a concept, a literary genre, and a material reality. Despite deeply-ingrained ideas of the end of the world as fire and brimstone, Medieval scholar Bernard McGinn notes that an apocalypse is really just an unveiling or uncovering—a revelation of some great, previously hidden knowledge, usually of how the end (defined broadly) will come about. The poems in this collection are my own apocalypses—texts which reveal something to me as they’re being written. Grounded in readings of biblical prophecy and Medieval eschatological texts, such as those of Hildegard of Bingen and Joachim of Fiore, these poems address endings, ecologies, collapse. Moving through a confessional, lyric mode, a fragmentary, digital mode, and the more traditional lexicon of mystical revelation, this collection enacts the long process of uncovering what an ending feels like—the religious vs. the secular, the collective vs. the personal, the created vs. the decreated. The apocalypse-in-construction here asks: how do we exist in relation to others and to space? How do we mediate, and how are we mediated by, our environment? How do we conceive of futurity?

Midtribulationists, the least popular of apocalyptic millenarians, believe the elect will suffer through part of the tribulation before being saved, ascending just as God’s real wrath is unleashed on the unworthy. They are not kept entirely apart from destruction, but they are also not witnesses of the true end. They are suspended in the very middle of messianic time, endlessly waiting.