by Elizabeth Forrest
In his newest book of poetry, the luxury, Darren C. Demaree explores the emotions and conflicts of navigating an ecological apocalypse. The book holds 59 poems on 59 pages—each divided into three meditative tercets that spill over with anger, frustration, and melancholy. The poems in the luxury are less about the natural world than they are about Demaree’s anxiety about its destruction, maintaining an anthropocentric lens throughout the collection. It is a bit like a found-footage horror film, with ragged heavy breaths and snatches of conversation and the deaths that occur off-screen—amorphous and terrifying.
The pieces evoke frustration and a sense of impotence in witnessing a world that is changing due to a tide of human inaction. Demaree interrogates the ethics of our collective approach to stewardship, writing “we know winter windows / all darken motherfuckers / are still using coal here // & may the flood find them first” (p. 37). There is the palpable friction of chafing against those you share a world with but not the same ethical perspective: “give me green land // or give me a culture that doesn’t roast the damn world” (p. 20).
In his uneasiness about the fate of the planet lies a desperation for the future his children will live in, which manifests as a sort of existentialism through parenthood. In his poems, Demaree examines his own choices and their environmental impact. Toward the end of the collection, Demaree confesses, “maybe having children / was a mistake…. i / needed them but my needs are / bringing forth the ocean” (p. 56).
One need only look around for a more explicit illustration of the world on fire. Not long after the publication of this book, Demaree’s home state of Ohio experienced a very public demonstration of environmental disaster when 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern train derailed, releasing hazardous materials. An eco-horrific landscape of billowing black smoke and raging (though purportedly controlled) fires realized a collective fear of catastrophe by human means. These concerns are readily accessible to anyone paying attention to their environment or paying attention to those who study it. In the luxury, Demaree empathetically models an ecological self-consciousness and self-examination for all of us living and dying in the anthropocene.
