Poet Claire DeVoogd’s first book explores what happens to speech, history, and the future when approached from an imagined position after ending—after after—charting a path from an unreal “before” to modernity.

Claire DeVoogd has a capacious mind. Her poetry has the commotion of history’s frantic details and grand movements, and a metaphysical silence that is post-apocalyptic. Via is a road for visionary readers. —Robert Glück