If you keep reading from left to right, it’s meaningless. You have to change your strategy and read from top to bottom: this is a hand for form’s sake. In another, letters form the shape of a mask or a human face. Curving columns of lower-case l’s make the sides of the face. The last l leads into the words “loss of”; the word “identity” forms the chin. The eyes are made of lower-case e’s (e for eye), the nostrils are o’s, the mouth a line of m’s (m for mouth). Downward, the features spell “eom” (memo-ese for end of message). The satisfaction of “solving” these puzzles, or finding possible solutions, offers relief from the mystery of the rest, which might be unsolvable — much like the real problems (climate disaster, ecological collapse) the book imagines us living, or not living, after.

If the book sounds maddening, it often is. It seems frustrated with itself: “oh that’s just more words,” Notley writes; “how tedious, this!” The tedium might enhance the really enthralling parts — like reading a religious text, I thought, then read the line, “Let’s call this grey stuff light.” There is joy throughout the book, in Notleyish lines like “Stars look like the word stars, / really do … and sparkle is better as its word.” I love that — an image that’s purely linguistic. But this book also annoys me deeply. A few stanzas down from the stars line, which I annotated with giant asterisks, Notley writes: “World is coming to an end means, Word is coming to an end.” This wordplay I find corny, too easy. There’s a certain corniness to the whole sci-fi setup, One’s journey in the glyph. “Only poems can deal in the inexplicable,” Notley claims, but I kept thinking of Hollywood movies: “Arrival,” “The Matrix.” There’s too much pre-existing scenery and special effects in our minds to imagine this world up from scratch.

“For the Ride” is not exactly an optimistic book, since life as we know it in this futurescape is toast. But there is a strain of wishful thinking in the idea that neologisms, revamped grammars, could effect better living. One’s “new langue” erases difference by design — or there can be no difference, because the language doesn’t allow it. Our avatar is not a he or she; One, paradoxically, is semi-plural, representing every one. “There’s no class, race, gender” in the postapocalypse; “differences between the ones are gone now.” Is this utopian, or anti-identity? “Is there some justice?” the poem later asks. That’s not an answerable question anymore: “Translate that please.” Does global destruction offer some kind of radical freedom? “Don’t have to be what / one is pastly in life.” This makes me think of a cryptic tweet by the climate philosopher Timothy Morton: “You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure. Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house.”

A lot of recent books fall into this microgenre: climate-aware, speculative poetry, mixing the fantastical with what you might call dystopian realism. Brenda Shaughnessy’s “The Octopus Museum” is one example; Chris Nealon’s “The Shore” is another. These books take place in hell on earth and are nostalgic for the present. There’s a sameness to them. It’s no one’s fault; you don’t know you’re writing the zeitgeist when you’re in it, and then it’s too late — like all those people in the ’70s who named their daughters Jennifer. My best friend is a Jennifer, and I often think of her mother explaining how novel it sounded at the time, and how regal, a variation on “Guinevere.” When she said that, for a flash I heard the beauty in the name.