Literati is thrilled to welcome Angie Estes to celebrate the release of Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City (Unbound Edition Press, 2025).

About the book: Dedication to the transformative power of language itself defines Estes’ Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City. These poems excavate Baudelairean correspondences — secret relations in the world of things — reveling in the ways that etymology uncovers the ancient life of language, even as the play and slippages of language access alternative modes of being.

Language in this work becomes a way of moving across, questioning time and culture. Somewhere between seduction and annihilation, between Pavlov and Pavlova (as one poem puts it), at the end of days, of light, what are the words we would want to speak?

Angie Estes is the author of seven books of poems. Among her many honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her book Tryst was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. She has received fellowships from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.