Afterlight

Caleb Nolen's poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Bat City Review, Fence, The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has received support from Blue Mountain Center and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

"The experience of reading Afterlight was a rare one for me. I couldn't stop turning the pages. It is a propulsive, almost primal read; grief, longing, sorrow, and sympathy swelled inside me, bursts of feeling I did not expect and could not control."--Jennifer T. Chang, from the foreword "These spare, unadorned poems open in the fissures of memory. Childhood and adolescence in particular are explored via emotional snapshots that are both tough and immensely tender. One of the most remarkable things about this poet is an absolute clarity that transcends the literal, which gives him big range and authority. The book is wholly original in that the poems travel all the way back to the origins of what they confront, including brilliant forays into matters of religion and the subtle underlying violence of a rough childhood. More than a few of these poems moved me deeply. This is the strongest first book I've read in a very long time."--Chase Twichell, author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been "Caleb Nolen's Afterlight chronicles a harrowing adolescence, reviewed retrospectively in the light of a faith that illuminates but will neither explain nor assuage. Rarely do I encounter poems written with such styptic care. Suspended between exorcism and elegy, each of these poems is a razor held in a living hand, waiting for the what-comes-next but already caught in the what-comes-after."--G.C. Waldrep, author of The Opening Ritual