Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems

By Noelle Kocot Description Reviews You leave me no choice my neighborhoodYou leave me no choice my neighborhood Brutal and apocalyptic, a New York epic in the beat tradition. A tragic narrative journey through a New York wasteland and a warning to a city and a world in danger, Noelle Kocot’s third book has the prophetic immediacy of Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the urgent clarity of Langston Hughes. In her third book, Kocot (The Raving Fortune, 2004) echoes Ginsberg’s “Howl” in a 33-page elegy on the gentrification and decline of her home borough of Brooklyn, a place which represents both a troubled outer world and a deeply pained inner life in the wake of a husband’s death: "My neighborhood of ghost shoes of Bloomberg and blood.” Sixteen spare and disjointed lyrics also take up these themes, by turns humorous, icy and overwhelmingly sad.Publishers WeeklyNot for nothing does Kocot’s title summon Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”: these poems are saturated with despair, but