So often (let’s be honest here) we poets
will invent dreams, for our own strategic purposes.
But this one is real, and one of the few
I remember. I awoke in the future.
                              —from “Mailbox”


To Be Read in 500 Years is the poet Albert Goldbarth’s time capsule for a future that none of us can now imagine—a world without mailboxes, without sexual reproduction, without oil or tillable soil, without the capacity to understand music or poetry or “love love love love crazy love.” Goldbarth’s smart and nostalgic collection of poems, spoken from that future’s distant past, reminds us of everything we have to lose.