A Night in the Country

Selected by Louise Glück as Winner of the 2023 Changes Book Prize, Laura Newbern's second collection is a work of burning, restrained urgency that looks at loss, isolation, the passage of time—and what endures despite. Written in a town that was once home to the world's largest asylum, these poems are studies in the dual nature of that idea: asylum, always both a protection and an exile.

The "country" of these poems is not, or not only, the idyllic backdrop of a pastoral scene; it is also, a...