Was It For This

A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poems-about London, terror, postpartum anxiety, the Grenfell Tower fire, and how we live now.

What do we do when the world ends? We eat broiled salmon with the fat wiped off, sozzled raisins, airplane hazelnuts, dark berries, parfaits, and just-ripe peaches. We read Homer, Yeats, Eliot, Freud, Woolf, Marie Kondo, and Twitter. We watch YouTube, Peppa Pig, the news, the numbers, and each other-closely. We scrounge for cash. We mourn. We fall in love with a stranger's beautiful mouth. Some of us have babies. Some of us grow old.

In the follow-up to her acclaimed debut, Three Poems (winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize), Hannah Sullivan gathers reportage, verse, prose, transcription, and photographs into an ambitious, elegiac book about time, loss, aging, and the collision between personal crises and historical upheaval: the threat of nuclear war; global warming; the contemporary police state; the pandemic; and, at the center, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, and the violence, shame, and horror it incited. Moving from lockdown in West London, to childhood homes bought and sold and remodeled and remembered, to dive bars and strange luncheons in San Francisco, to endless winter in Boston with its "dirty boulders of snow," to New York, where for a minute everything seemed possible, Was It for This chronicles an ordinary life with extraordinary precision, potency, and lyricism.