Product details
- ISBN 9781647692988
- Dimensions: 140 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 24 Jul 2026
- Publisher: University of Utah Press,U.S.
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn't speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
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.
