The Rapture: A Miracle Play in Four Acts by James Sherry and Mark Wallace

What a spectacle we've made of ourselves, making a mess of our world. Human pomposity, worthy of myth's inflated realities--and worthy of being popped. In their miracle play, James Sherry and Mark Wallace get the job done splendidly, zeroing in on American democracy: a mess so sordid, it dirties heaven itself. Their spectacle is shrewdly drawn, their analysis timely, their cosmic inflation delicious. The play pops!

—Benjamin Friedlander


The Rapture portrays the ghosts that lurk within their existential foreclosure as chatter, being penultimate portion of the habitual world.

—Will Alexander


“Difficile est saturam non scribere (It is difficult not to write satire),” wrote Juvenal. As so-called civilization reaches, or perhaps surpasses, its nadir, opportunities for satire abound. Making lemonade with the toxic lemons of our fraught times, Dramaturges James Sherry and Mark Wallace have created a topsy-turvy medieval Miracle Play replete with zombies, lobbyists, CEOs, and, of course, God and Jesus. Written in lucid, snappy verse lines, the play puts me in mind of Brecht's songs. The brash, obnoxious characters DGAF, even the Big Ones. Vain Jesus preens in a hand mirror and sells shares of heaven, and God observes: "I is a concept all you, uh, people use to promote your own ideas and gain authority through another––me."  It’s mordant, clever, antic, and disastrously funny.

—Nada Gordon



James Sherry is the author of 15 books of poetry and theory and one of the leading proponents of both Language Writing and Environmental Poetics. His books include Comin’ ’Round: Selected Writing (Chax Press), Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection (Palgrave MacMillan), The Oligarch: Rewriting Machiavelli’s The Prince for Our Time (Palgrave MacMillan), Entangled Bank (Chax), Oops! Environmental Poetics (BlazeVox), Four For (Meow), Our Nuclear Heritage (Sun & Moon Press), Lazy Sonnets (Potes and Poets Press), In Case (Sun & Moon Press), Part Songs (Awede Press). His work has been translated into nine languages. He is the editor of Roof magazine and Roof Books, a seminal literary publisher associated with virtually every innovative strategy in English language writing of the past 40 years. Roof Books has published nearly 200 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative and environmental poetry and poetics. He started the Segue Foundation in 1977 that has produced over 10,000 events. Sherry lives in New York City.


Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than twenty books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Selections of his ongoing multi-part long poem The End of America, which he has been writing since 2005, have been published in several chapbooks and many journals. BlazeVox has previously published two of his books, a novel, The Quarry and the Lot (2010), and Walking Dreams: Selected Early Tales (2007). His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. He lives in San Diego, California.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 110 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-506-9

$18