Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
"When I wake I'm in ninth grade again," begins "Reunion," the first poem in Caleb Nolen's debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn't speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker's search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book's end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
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Afterlight
About this book
Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Foreword
- Reunion
- Blackout
- Letter to Cain
- Reprieve
- Letter to Abel
- John’s parents
- Letter to Mary of Oignies
- First Gun
- Mondegreen
- Late Vigil
- Homecoming
- Molotov
- Black Friday
- Waking Dream
- Last Rites
- Ode
- Open Water
- Afterlight
- Letter to Job
- The Deal
- Jonah Years
- Killing the Fattened Calf
- Working Out
- Study Hour
- Letter to the Woman Taken in Adultery
- Updated Portrait in a Grocery Store
- Letter to Paul the Apostle
- Night Drives on PA-26
- Letter to Bobby
- Mondegreen
- Letter to Judas
- Reprieve
- Listen
- Letter to the Man Possessed by Demons
- Appendix: Hagiographies
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
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Yes, you can access Afterlight by Caleb Nolen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.