The Rapture

Close observations of the "impossibly holy task" of living with grief from award-winning poet Michael Crummey.

In November 2019, a nineteen-year-old university student pulled an all-nighter to study for a midterm. The following day, after the exam, he went to his bedroom to lay down for a nap.

He didn't wake up. He is still asleep.

For those that knew and loved him, that absence is a defining feature of their experience. The implications and effects of the loss are still rippling outward, altering both past and future, still burrowing deeper into the lives of the people left behind.

Occasionally we are marked by events so sudden and shattering that the world we inhabit is reborn as something wholly strange, something nearly helpless. The Rapture is a response to one such event, a stab at the “impossibly holy task” of living with and recording it. From close observations of the raw intimacies of grief, to riffs on the beauty and absurdity and arbitrary consequence of being, these poems are an attempt to name an irremediable loss and to fix the world we love in its glaring, all-consuming light.