Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She has received fellowships and grants from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Her collaborative illustrated journalism has been recognized with an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Insight Award for Visual Journalism.
Park’s work has appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Grist, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, ProPublica, and elsewhere.
Her new book is World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After.
At Lit Hub Park tagged five "books that grapple with—and seek to undermine, complicate, and create new meanings from—visions of apocalypse." One title on the list:
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff SharletRead about the other books on Park's list at Lit Hub.
The least optimistic book in the list, but the most clear-eyed and clarifying excavation of the Far Right and its spiritual deprivations, from the vacuity of “hipster Christendom” to the red-pilled, “great phallic oversoul” of the manosphere; the conspiratorial gnosticism of Trump devotees and the perverseprosperity gospel of Trump’s rallies where, Sharlet writes, it is as if “loss itself, the very concept of grief, had been disappeared.”
I read The Undertow a couple years ago and there are specific images I have never been able to shake: an emaciated moose covered in glistening ticks, a family cat lying amid a massive pile of guns, a three-year-old child lying on his belly, shooting an automatic rifle. The heaviness is punctuated by Sharlet’s photography, his hysterically funny observations, as well as painfully beautiful meditations on the prophetic imagination of Harry Belafonte and Occupy Wall Street protestors—who Sharlet describes as fools “in the holy tradition, the one that speaks not truth to power but imagination to things as they are.”
Sharlet writes from “the aftermath,” peering into the deepest darkest reaches of a world wrought by the entangled forces of white Christian nationalism, fascism, and authoritarianism. Still, Sharlet draws us forward: “We will need new songs if we are to make it through what is to come—what is already here. I am not the one to write them. My hope is less than that: only that this book may reveal fault lines within our fears, in which others will find better words our children may one day sing.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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