The Unbeatable Slow Machine is David de Young's second collection of poetry. The poems shine a torch into the ever-increasing entropy of the universe and ask us not to rage against, but to live in harmony with the dying of the light. We see how little the world changed during the global pandemic, during which many of these poems were written. There was already no way back to the world we once knew; we had just not realized it yet. In the collection's titular poem (paraphrasing Carlos Rovelli), de Young notes, "The world is made up of kisses, not stones." Which is to say, nothing lasts, but while it does, it's something to marvel at.