Wideawake Field: Poems

The chairs have come in

and the crisp yellow thwock

of the ball being hit

says somehow, now that it's fall,

I'm a memory of myself.

My whole old life—

I mourn you sometimes

in places you would have been.
—October

The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The ...