My Bourgeois Apocalypse

Helen Rickerby

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781776712328
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A surprising and genre-bending poetic memoir about the years when everything got weirder. 'I write not to communicate or reveal but to mull and conceal, but I guess that' s a form of communication too, of connection, of little anchors, little hooks, little holes you can put your eye up to, your heart up to, and maybe you will see something you will recognise.' In her new collection – a poetic collage-essay-memoir – Helen Rickerby crafts poems out of personal correspondence and sentences from her journals, cataloguing her life over a tumultuous period of lockdowns, terrorist attacks and mid-life crises. In glimpses of the day-to-day, in occasional bits of Italian homework and dining-room dance parties, pieces of a life are constructed into a sensuous yet disarming whole. Through friendships and grief, joy and love, combining wry humour with philosophical musing, Rickerby reflects on doubt, gaps, the nature of poetry, connection and disconnection, and not going quietly into middle age. My Bourgeois Apocalypse is a work of fragments encompassing the whole of a life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• #1 (A sort of prologue)
• #2 (This just doesn’t happen here … but it did)
• #3 (‘[A] poem is a thinking thing’)
• #4 (I apologise in advance to fans of Blake)
• #5 (I have learned to read over and over)
• #6 (Because I am a poet I wrote about it)
• #7 (Sometimes even the present feels like a memory)
• #8 (We don’t actually have that many parties)
• #9 (I thought 2020 was going to be a great year – how wrong I was)
• #10 (The summer of (The) Crying (Book))
• #11 (During lockdown I was so busy coping with my feelings about the crisis that I didn’t really have time to work, but instead we wrote a blog about music from the early 90s)
• #12 (At least at level 3 we could get takeaways delivered)
• #13 (What is the new normal and what if I don’t want to go back to normal?)
• #14 (The new normal)
• #15 (I realised I did not have a favourite tree)
• #16 (Shall we try again with another year?)
• #17 (The past is narrative – and perhaps the future is too?)
• #18 (It’s been a long time since I climbed a tree)
• #19 (The Broken-heart Hotline did reply)
• #20 (The unexpected second lockdown ruined what was going to be the most fun week)
• #21 (We find ways to connect, even during lockdowns, especially during lockdowns)
• #22 (Some books can save your life)
• #23 (Everywhere you go, you’ll always take yourself)
• #24 (In poetry everything becomes metaphorical, even the wine glasses)
• #25 (I understand swimming in winter but, like a lot of things, I don’t want to do it)
• #26 (Lazarina goes to the big wreckers in the sky, and we get covid for the first time)
• #27 (My Italian is not really that good, even now)
• #28 (Is journalling a way of speaking without making a sound?)
• #29 (Sometimes all you can do is drink from the Bridge of Sighs)
• #30 (The theme was to come as a musical icon)
• #31 (We talked about flying to Vegas)
• #32 (I love my sequinned jacket)
• #33 (I am no longer afraid of quicksand, but is that a mistake?)
• #34 (When I got so panicky about the building work that we had to move out of our house for a couple of weeks)
• #35 (Teen angst poetry is a necessary evil)
• #36 (His last phone call was a mixture of comedy and tragedy – but so is life)
• #37 (Sometimes it is warm even in winter)
• #38 (The freedom of randomness and chance)
• #39 (I don’t quite know how it happened, but somehow I became middle-aged)
• #40 (What to run from, what to work on, and what to accept)
• #41 (If this is the beginning of the end, can I call ‘Disco!’?)
• Notes
• Acknowledgements