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A hyperreal continuum of poems that reflect inner and outer landscapes transfixed by sacrilege, absurdity, divinity, humor, awe, pop culture, and the sublime, and unhinged by grief and anxiety in seasons of extinction, mass death, and apocalyptic revelation.
Born from a lost season, The Great Dying: Poems As Seen on TV reads as an enthralling pre-Raphaelite action movie from an apocalyptic world of mass death and personal reckoning, one where the wild, god-eat-god plains of Internet media become a spaghetti western wilderness of holy metamorphosis as fast food, hideous horses, and viral pop culture lore become diving rods for a female body navigating extreme weathers of grief, horror, fury, beauty, panic, and mania. Haunted by cartoons, Tom Cruise, balloon animals, and broken fire alarms and led by the Virgilian spectre of Emily Dickinson, The Great Dying beholds wonder in a merciless season to hold space for mercy in a light-forsaken world, ever lit from within by the knowledge that such surrender to the sublime is not only a radical act of survival: it is a hagioscope through which we glimpse transfiguration until we become it.
"M. K. Foster's debut poetry collection The Great Dying is relentless, edgy, and darkly humorous. God and the calendar are amoral predators stalking the speaker. Nature and pop culture blend with the personal in a violently entertaining mix. The book is organized as a movie franchise and these are action thrillers with a heart that you don't want to miss! To quote the speaker, 'Every day, it's the same: / God wakes up and chooses violence. / Every time. So maybe I should, too.' Laugh-out-loud, five-star cinema!" — Danielle Hanson, Guest Editor and author of The Night Is What It Eats
"Dolly Parton, Oregon Trail funeral music, Daffy Duck, and Katie Holmes's cashmere bra all become occasions for poems in M. K. Foster's witty and larger-than-life poetry collection, The Great Dying: Poems As Seen on TV. In poems that cascade from pop culture to grief, in language that swirls irreverence deliciously within a larger lyric reckoning, the imagination in M. K. Foster's poems knows no bounds, punning and quoting. Foster's poems are embodied while playing with language as a screen for meaning, and at the root of it all is a truth-telling about the body's lived experience: 'I'm finally telling my body the truth about. / my body. And we're not taking it well.' Headline spins into poem, poem into vessel for dark humor and self-investigation where punk rock meets John Ashbery. Irreverence becomes spiritual in Foster's poetic pyrotechnics where the imagination is expansively elegiac. As the speaker says in 'Pizza Jesus,' where 'bird after bird breaks against my window / until I finally convince myself it's rain,' '[i]t's what I need to be true, // so it is.'" — Tyler Mills, author of The Bomb Cloud and City Scattered
"The Great Dying is a late-night scroll through one disaster after another. It's binge-watching extinction. We bounce back and forth between vulnerability and rage, painfully aware that facing the end would be so much easier if we could just embrace numbness and resignation. These poems refuse to stop feeling, no matter how much it hurts." — Rob MacDonald, editor of Sixth Finch
M. K. Foster is a poet, fiction writer, and historian of science from Alabama. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Nimrod, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, The Gettysburg Review, Molotov Cocktail, Best New Poets, and elsewhere in the United States, and in Skylight 47, Crannóg, and The Apiary in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where she was nominated for a 2026 Forward Prize. She has presented her archival research on Renaissance monstrosity, sharks, and apocalypses at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, the National Museum of Denmark, and elsewhere. In 2024, she was named a MacDowell Fellow in Literature and selected for the 2025 Fulbright US Scholar Award in Creative Writing at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland. In Fall 2025, she returned abroad as a Maison Dora Maar Fellow in Ménerbes, France. Foster's current projects include a poetry collection about deep geologic time and the divine feminine, a manuscript of fairytales, a southern gothic monster saga, and an apocryphal novel retelling of the Flood epic. She holds an MFA and a PhD but holds especially dear her work as a bookseller and storyteller at Little Professor Bookshop in Birmingham, Alabama.