The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose “songs of experience hum with immediacy” (The New York Times)
I Will Destroy You
Poems
- “What is there to say when a book is such absolute perfection—beauty, grief, and redemption—that it literally takes all words and air from the mouth?”—Jacqueline Woodson
Here’s
the deal—if you die
then I will be able
to drink again & no
one alive will even
blame me—this,
child, is
the dark wind in-
side, but not
the darkest.
—from “Text to be Whispered by the Bed of a Sleeping Child”
the deal—if you die
then I will be able
to drink again & no
one alive will even
blame me—this,
child, is
the dark wind in-
side, but not
the darkest.
—from “Text to be Whispered by the Bed of a Sleeping Child”
Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.
$16.00
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About the Author
Credit: Ryan McGinley
Upcoming Events
Graywolf at 45: Poetry reading co-sponsored by the Poetry Foundation
Date:
Location:
Poetry Foundation in Chicago, ILview map
A poetry reading featuring Nick Flynn (I Will Destroy You), Carmen Giménez Smith (Be Recorder), Erika L. Sánchez (Lessons on Expulsion), Diane Seuss (Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl), and Tom Sleigh (House of Fact, House of Ruin). Co-sponsored by and hosted at the Poetry Foundation.
Free and open to the public, with reception to follow.
Praise
- “To read these poems is to reach in and touch the scar, the feigned wound, put trust in what may, at any moment, show its teeth, bite, transmogrify into dissolution, deception, destruction and, yes, love.’”—Nuar Alsadir
- “Nick Flynn, that charismatic horse thief, is up to it again. Standing this close. Whatever you have or had to lose (to win), he’s already stolen and sold it. And yet you still (and so badly) want to hear from him, have him tell you how we (can) live.”—Olena Kalytiak Davis
- “Nick Flynn’s poems are gritty and emotional, grim and loving, funny and also about death and addiction and grief. I can’t wait to sleep with this volume under my pillow.”—Lit Hub
