““I wanted to run but there wasn’t anywhere to go. So I waited there as the poison dripped, dripped.”
- from “There’s This Dream I Have” by James H. Duncan ”
We don’t select a Drunk Monkeys Book of the Year every calendar year, because there are so many contenders that it can be hard to reach a consensus choice. But in 2017, no book moved us, challenged us, and inspired us like James Duncan’s poetry collection We Are All Terminal But This Exit is Mine.
It’s poetry the way you wish more people wrote poetry - delivered with the breathless cadence of an all-night bitch session, the kind that you reflect back on as if somewhere in there, you’d reached the secrets of life itself. It’s a chronicle of Duncan’s own experience with cancer but, as with all of the best art, it reaches deep into the memories of the reader, asking them to examine the tender specificities that form a life.
It’s a powerful, transformative, and funny work - and our choice for Best Book of 2017.
