With a disco ball as a north star, My Boyfriend Apocalypse responds to the myriad, simultaneous apocalypses we are and are not surviving, from the everyday crises of being a body to the global emergencies of devastating climate change and unfettered white supremacy. These poems ask what it would be like to make out with the end of the world: Who slipped tongue first? Is the apocalypse a good kisser? Are you?
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The speculative tenderness at the heart of antmen pimentel mendoza's poetry embraces life, not just survival, while the future is still ours to imagine. The opening poem of My Boyfriend Apocalypse begins, "Baby, dance," and all we have to do is let the gentle swaying hold us. These poems aren't trying to outlast the apocalypse because they already know it's "now and forever," but the urgent conjunction that bridges the two is just enough time to love unabashedly. The end of the world is the expanse where all of the poet's wonders coalesce. She asks: "Who cradles us?" and the question tends to longing without forcing an answer. The poet bears witness to histories of imperialism, grief, and violence with unwavering insistence on the intimacies our kinship makes possible. Every YouTube rabbit hole-portal, every photo of beloveds tucked into wallets, every kiss that we meet with eyes closed. In her sensual poetry, everything that keeps us soft keeps us listening, keeps us alive. José Esteban Muñoz wrote, "We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality." Rarely have I felt more possible than in the wonder of antmen pimentel mendoza's poetry, the worlds she makes a touch closer with her tenderness.
- Sanjana Bijlani
For those of us still coming to terms with global health crises and general sense of everything being a total trash fire, antmen pimentel mendoza's My Boyfriend Apocalypse is the antidote to doom scrolling our way to numbness. Drawing on internet trends, pop music references, post-therapy assessments, and more, pimentel mendoza skillfully makes a case for seemingly mundane acts like ass eating as a political gesture in a book that insists "Spill, baby" and cheekily (tenderly) asks you "to fold/ your way /into more bravery, or at least, fewer fonts of shame." This book seems to recognize no bounds to radical love, sex, and survival in a time when we keep waking up to the chill world ending. In the face of incessant apocalypse, pimentel mendoza beckons us to laugh, fuck, fall in love, and hold each other for just a minute longer.
- Muriel Leung, author of Imagine Us, The Swarm
Delectable, magical, and sparkly tomorrows: these words glittered in my brain as I devoured pimentel mendoza's My Boyfriend Apocalypse. A mixture of eroticism, queer yearning, and transformative grief-pimental mendoza asks us to imagine and materialize what a future-oriented and world-making apocalypse looks like. Whether it is the way our "flesh betrays our secret stinks" or "if a starry sky waits on the other side," pimentel mendoza reminds us how being ravaged and unraveled can feel oh-so-gratifying, opening us to new dimensions of pleasure, possibility, and existence we have not thought of before.
- MT Vallarta, author of What You Refuse to Remember
