Tallahassee. Tallahassee. Tallahassee.

Your mist today is incredible

as it settles on this rose garden!

When the largest rose shook off its dew

and looked at me like a cartoon, I smiled back

and promised not to break his neck.

And here we are together again, walking in a park

that honors dead children. A tree planted for each child

on such a mild day in December. And how the dead

children stream through me, scrolls of them:

Lily! Rose! Bobby!

Kierkegaard says anyone who follows through

on an idea becomes unpopular. And also

that a person needs a system, otherwise you

become mere personality. He must not have

known very many poets, so prone to tyrannical

shifts in mood. Change in the weather is equal to

don't let me go crazy. In the car on the way

to school Charlotte says, "I like to be gentle

with nature because I like nature."

But my mind wouldn't rest, system-less,

as I drive through dread:

Lily! Rose! Bobby!

You're dead, you're dead.

Atopia grapples with the political climate of the United States manifested through our everyday lives. Sandra Simonds charts the formations and deformations of the social and political through the observations of the poem's speakers, interspersed with the language of social media, news reports, political speech, and the dialogue of friends, children, strangers, and politicians. The Los Angeles Review of Books characterized Simonds's work as "robust, energetic, fanciful, even baroque" and "a necessary counterforce to the structures of gender, power, and labor that impinge upon contemporary life." These poems reflect on what it means to be human, what it means to build communities within a political structure it also opposes.