Something Has to Happen Next

Book excerpt: The poems in something has to happen next, if given the chance, might peer down inquisitively from a great height; they speak of quietness, namelessness, the reachlessness of love, the fortune of animals and their silence, apocalypse, abandonment, beginnings, and endings. Working with brevity and compression, Andrew Michael Roberts first imagines how small he can go with a poem and still maintain some sort of emotional or imagistic center. Then, released from this limitation, the rest of his playful, unexpected poems expand to fill a world with imagery, emotion, and sound. What Roberts calls “simply a book of small poems” grew out of his obsessions with time and catastrophe and love and abandonment—what is always possible, almost attained, but lost at the last minute. When something ends or when everything ends, something else must always happen next—what will it be, and who will be there to name and love and destroy it?