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Book Title

Low

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Nick Flynn
Poem Excerpt
                         Since
 
day one there’s always been
 
two of me—the one
with eyes closed & the one
 
trying to keep the other alive. One
dumbstruck, the other
 
all in.
 
—from “Dumbstruck”
 
Body
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.
 

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List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-259-2
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
112
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
“Nobody bends a lyric the way Flynn does to break the heart.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

About the Author

Nick  Flynn
Credit: Ryan McGinley
Nick Flynn is the author of four poetry books, including I Will Destroy YouMy Feelings, and Some Ether, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and three memoirs, including Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He teaches at the University of Houston and lives in New York.
http://www.nickflynn.org/
More by author

Praise

  • "I’m always interested in reading a new collection from Nick Flynn; this one 'explores the jaggedness of memory and what is salvageable when the past is broken by loss, violence, and trauma' and features not only poems but essayish prose pieces. Can’t wait to dive in."—Literary Hub
  • "Flynn’s bracing sixth collection (following I Will Destroy You) contains lyric poems and cinematic, fragmentary sequences that record the generative spaces of art, memory, and place."—Publishers Weekly
  • "Flynn (also a memoirist) also returns to themes of trauma, forgiveness and resilience, missing essayistic prose among his usual lyrics."—The New York Times Book Review
  • "Divided into “sides” like some strangely linear, multi-album LP, Flynn’s collection describes a past that persists in the memory but is mostly as archaic as vinyl records."—David Woo, Literary Hub
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