Afterlife

Michael Dhyne received an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize; he is currently pursuing a master's degree in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Community of Writers, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Spectacle, and elsewhere.

To My Father, the Light Kara Insomnia Afterlife Living Room In Love with a Girl Eating Strawberries God's Eye Self-Portrait with Sky Left Over Memorial Arizona The Window New Mexico 4 a.m. Texas A Beginning Louisiana Without End Tennessee Last Words to My Husband Virginia Like a Gift Passed Between Us Nothing Blackout Self-Portrait on the Beloved's Body On Silence 95 South Sonogram Portrait of My Father as a Young Man Tell Me a Story Father's Day Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), Cy Twombly, 1994 Heaven Is Empty and We're All in It Notes Acknowledgments

Heartbreaking and brilliant in its delicacy and its depths, and in the many ways it reaches from interior drama to range far out into the wider world. The spell cast by this book ties our adult ways of moving through our lives to the primitive child-need for magic and reassurance: the longing we all know for order amid the terrors of random events, and the search, in the welter of our days, for the place or person or state of mind in which self can feel held." - Debra Nystrom