'Maria Takolander is a poet of uncompromising vision and imaginative power. She strips the world of easy sentiment, restoring experience to the realm of the body and the materiality of history. Her work is characterised by gothic beauty, but it can also be marked by deadpan wit. This collection is divided into three parts, focusing on the alienating event of childbirth; those places of the poet’s imaginative landscape haunted by the past (Finland, South America, and Australia); and the cruelties suffered and inflicted by the human animal. The End of the World, Takolander’s second full-length poetry collection, reveals the strangeness of our lives in verse that is often provocative and always striking.' (Publisher's blurb)
