Trouble Department

Description

In the school of the future, there is no future

In this chapbook, M. Shaw presents 11 poems written in the voices of the students at a futuristic high school, floating in the clouds. Sent there by their wealthy parents to be safe from school shootings and worse, as violence on the Earth’s surface escalates over the planet’s dwindling resources, they begin to question their teachers, first over their presence in the school and eventually over their, or anyone’s, will to live in a dying world.

Meanwhile, ocean acidification driven by climate change is pushing the microbes that produce most of the planet’s oxygen toward extinction. When the school’s contact with the surface abruptly cuts out, all of them are forced to reckon with the uncomfortable truth of their situation: that there may, at long last, be no escape from the sins of their parents.