Low by Nick Flynn

Low explores the jaggedness of memory and what is salvageable when the
past is broken by loss, violence, and trauma. Punctuating Nick Flynn's
signature lyric poems are prose pieces and sequences, veering toward
essays, including Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger's Apartment," a
truly strange experience of cataloging a deceased neighbor's belongings and
how quickly they become worthless; "Notes on Thorns & Blood," a study of
time and wounds; and "Notes on a Year of Corona,"a loose sonnet crown
about the early stages of the pandemic and the unrest after racist police
violence.
Despite its existential reverberations, Low is a celebration of desire in all its
forms - the desire for home, the desire to be held, the desire for people to be
kind to one another, the desire to understand where we are from and what we
can do to make the best of that. But how do we create a home, these poems
ask, in a world of satellites and atom bombs and algorithms, those things
designed to dehumanize and reduce us? To get low is to reconnect with the
earth, to engage with the emotional state of the planet, to remember that "the
cure all along grows beside us." Flynn's collection is a prismatic, even
prophetic, experience, with new complexity and ardor at every turn.

NICK FLYNN's work - which includes Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,
winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Memoir, and the poetry
collections Blind Huber and Some Ether - has been translated into thirteen
languages.

Graywolf Press
On Sale: Nov 7/23
5.5 x 8.25 • 112 pages
9781644452592 • $23.00 • pb
Poetry / General