Applause is a collection of poems about joy and dread—mirroring the extremes of the contemporary American experience. Joy is defined in motherhood, self-conscious love, friendship—while dread is described through an accelerating sense of doom, and the failure of nearly all prescriptive political solutions to the world's problems. The overall mood is one of bravado in the face of ruin—the metaphor of applause, standing there clapping, well-intentioned in a crumbling world.