Full Description
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.
Contents
Reunion
I.
Blackout
Letter to Cain
Reprieve
Letter to Abel
John's Parents
Letter to Mary of Oignies
First Gun
Mondegreen
II.
Late Vigil
Homecoming
Molotov
Black Friday
Waking Dream
Last Rites
Ode
Open Water
Afterlight
Letter to Job
The Deal
III.
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
