SHORT 'N SWEET: THE BOOK SPEAKS: The Book of Drought

Book Title: The Book of Drought

Author: Rob Carney

Publisher: Texas Review Press, 2024, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Prize for Poetry and selected by the editors as one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2025

How would you, THE BOOK OF DROUGHT, describe yourself in two sentences or less?

I’m a book-length dystopian poem set in the West in our near future, a future with no more snowpack, no more rain. The lakes and the rivers are gone.

Where would you go on your dream vacation?

Back in time.

Back in time in order to show people that this is what’s coming if they go on acting without vision and imagination. I’m not the one taking away the elemental. I’m just the future. I’m just the result. But like the people who gather in my pages like pilgrims, I’m not without humor and hope. There’s humor and hope in the stories these people share with the Listener-Recorder. No one would bother with memories and story if loss were the only thing left.

What is your favorite color?

Blue. I mean, my very first words are, “We paint the rocks blue.” And there’s a reason why. And you aren’t going to like it. But truth can’t waste time pretending and keeping its eyes and mouth shut, right?

What is your favorite movie?

Never Cry Wolf. It’s a chance to see green again, and snow, and wolves, and someone plunging into water. And he wouldn’t survive without the help of new friends, and he wouldn’t learn if he didn’t have vision, imagination, curiosity, and empathy. Plus, the movie is based on a book, and the book is great too. It makes me wish that I could be a movie.

What advice would a therapist give you?

Ha! There are lines about this in my opening movement. Not as dialogue but as inference. And the Listen-Recorder’s reaction is better than anything I can say here.

What is your favorite smell?

Rain. Rain in the stories the people share. But rain—the smell and sound and feeling of it—is more than just a memory; it’s the if/then hope of my final movement. It’s the longing and hoped-for return that lets my story end.

Do you collect anything, and what do these items mean to you?

Yes. Maybe it doesn’t seem like it since the people have a shrine—this table-flat stone in a dried-up river—where they discard things, get rid of the relics they don’t need anymore, like ice-cube trays and whatnot. But they also collect things: origin stories, memories, their past lives, losses, new fables, new improvised rituals, letters to the past and the future, rhetorical questions they carve into rock. All of those are better than the loose change and employee lanyards they’ve gotten rid of.

What is your favorite snack?

There aren’t any. The things we took for granted are either luxuries or non-existent. A woman says, “There used to be almonds in the grocery store. How is that even possible?” Now there’s just hunger—a paradoxical snack, I suppose—snacks are really for other dystopias like Brave New World.

If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be and why?

I’d have dinner with the governor. I mentioned letters a second ago, and there’s one that a 17-year-old girl wrote to the governor. Every word is an insight. I’d have dinner with the governor so I could deliver it to him.