Reviewed by Chidinma Amogu

Extinction Song
by John James
Tupelo Press
May 2026, 35 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1961209558

There is a particular kind of helplessness that arrives with parenthood: the moment you hold something new and fragile and realize, with full clarity, what kind of world you have brought it into. John James knows this feeling well, and in Extinction Song, his Snowbound Chapbook Prize-winning collection from Tupelo Press, he does not pretend to have survived it with any wisdom intact. This is not a book about what to do. It is a book about what it feels like to watch, and to love anyway, and to keep watching.

The choice to call it a song matters. Not a warning, not a wake-up call, not even an elegy (elegies have closure built into them, a past tense to settle into). A song is something you make while things are still happening. James is singing in that gap.

It opens with algae pushing north. The first poem, “Lullaby,” dedicated to his newborn son Wendell, sets the book’s rhythm immediately: a cascade of ecological systems in slow migration, then a sudden pivot to a dark room where a baby coos while the morning news murmurs in his ear. Starlings “tighten / like fists along a strand / of telephone wire” while plankton colonies dissolve offshore. By the poem’s end the baby has drifted off, “gogging, I presume, / at its slow and secret ministry,” gazing at the television’s blue light with devotional blankness. The effect is not ironic so much as accurate. This is what it is to be alive right now: the world on fire, the child beautiful, the laundry still needing doing.

James returns to this collision throughout. In “Future Perfect” there is no Mars, no plan B, no second-chance planet, only the ground underfoot, and then a spider spinning silk between frost-bitten stems, the world wobbling on its axis and bending, in the poem’s final word, toward “bright.” That closing beat reads less like hope than like the persistence of phenomena: things continuing whether or not we have a framework for what they mean. James refuses the arc most environmental poetry reaches for, the turn toward urgency, or resolve, or grief with somewhere to go. The spider doesn’t know about the seabed faults. It spins anyway.

This is the collection’s most honest quality. The scale of climate change exceeds individual response, and James does not pretend otherwise. In “The Delusion of Being Absolute,” set during the 2019 PG&E power shutoff in California, he fishes, cooks, watches fire, and catalogs the varieties of black in a smoke-stained sky. He does not organize. He witnesses. The weather reports will not absolve us, he writes, and absolution is the right word, because what he’s describing is the quietly religious belief that awareness is the same as action, that feeling the weight of the crisis constitutes a response to it.

The poems move accordingly, they don’t conclude so much as accumulate and stop. In “Infinite Gyre of Possible Ends,” lines don’t just spin, they break mid-word on the page, the text physically unable to finish what it starts. “Circles” keeps returning to the Ohio River, Jefferson’s “most beautiful river on earth” in 1782, now ranked America’s dirtiest, the mind looping through the same contaminated ground. The forms mirror the content: nothing gets resolved because nothing is resolved.

What he offers instead is attention. Close, patient, beautifully rendered attention to the things that are still here: the baby’s slate gray eyes, the starlings tightening on the wire, the spider’s silk catching light in the cold garden. Extinction Song does not argue that this is enough. It just does it anyway, which feels, in the end, like the only honest position available. Make the song. Name what you see. Hold the baby.