Late Human is a collection of tragi-comic poems on lateness, belatedness, Weltschmerz, and borrowing (with a nod to Ernest Mandel’s 1975 tome on the twilight of capitalism). The human of the title is multiple, personal, and drenched in the tears of the 21st century. Cracked children’s rhymes lead onto an ethnography that takes Helen Mirren’s first film appearance as seriously as Moby Dick. At the volume’s center, three laments honor the “realism / that would send anyone to spasm,” a sentiment that crests in the book’s title poem before alighting, provisionally, in “Early Bird”—its dawn chorus.
