'A compelling and formally inventive collection of poems that is also a sweeping story, Stephen Lightbown's The Last Custodian chronicles crisis, and questions our ideas of memory, survival. When towns become "laden crematoriums," when tragedy takes everything, at that last moment, last stand: there is still a music. "I have to hear a sound," writes the poet, "even if it's played / to photographs". Coming as it does, in this moment of global pandemic, This book will touch many a reader with its unrelenting, questioning, echoing voice. A moving, inimitable book.' --Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa 'These poems are incredibly cinematic in their imagery, reminiscent at times of apocalyptic films such as 28 Days Later and The Road. This book is at times both bravely vulnerable and hearteningly playful. The Last Custodian quietly holds the everyday up to the light and makes us long for it; it asks what we could survive if we had to, and how that might change us.' -- Suzannah Evans 'The Last Custodian explodes with the force of myth. What would it be to be abruptly severed from the world as we know it? What would we learn, what would we discover? A compulsively readable narrative of survival, this book is also a revolutionary meditation on the construction of meaning and identity. “I know nothing of the road ahead,” Lightbown tells us. “No helmet. No call from inside.” In joining him on this open road, we, too, are changed.' -- Sheila Black, co-editor of “Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.” 'An inverted quest full of bite and wisdom, The Last Custodian features ductile writing, with an enviable ability to quicken the blood.' -- Rishi Dastidar 'Lightbown’s work is reminiscent of “The Comet,” W.E.B. DuBois’s work of speculative fiction, where a Black man and woman find themselves, temporarily, the sole survivors of a catastrophe. As in DuBois’s work, Lightbown’s dystopian landscape shines a light on how—in so-called “normal” times— it’s the marginalization of people based on race and disability that is the real catastrophe.' — Ellen McGrath Smith author of Nobody’s Jackknife