Preparations for the Afterlife: Selected Poems 1992–2025 gathers more than three decades of Paul Stubbs’s work, from the Beckettian radical mindscapes of the early poems through seven collections into a long and unresolved quarrel with God, matter, and the reach of the imagination coexisting with an inner poetic terrain. This is metaphysical poetry of bone and flesh, in which a soul is agonizingly incarcerated inside the body, an icon-maker fashions new deities, a churchless Christ lies locked in planetary ice, and the only surviving human rib goes under the auction hammer. Mock-instructional poems and a museum of theological relics sit alongside a sequence of ekphrastic poems based on Francis Bacon’s paintings, cosmological meditations on the thoughts of Simone Weil, and a Yeatsian beast set loose among Aquinas, Kant, and the Trinity. Thus along the years Stubbs has developed a unique voice in contemporary poetry, in line with the visionary attempts of David Gascoyne and Arthur Rimbaud, tussling with language, dislocating it from the accepted rules of grammar and syntax. Mingling poetry and philosophy, and harbouring the same terrifying doubt as, say, a John Donne, Stubbs presents an unorthodox re-evaluation of faith and human existence.