Wideawake Field

By Eliza Griswold

Book Overview

The chairs have come in and the crisp yellow thwock of the ball being hit says somehow, now that it's fall, I'm a memory of myself. My whole old life-- I mourn you sometimes in places you would have been . -- October The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds--the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places-- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in Wideawake Field sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374531307
• ISBN13: 9780374531300
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Welcome reprieve

As someone who has spent a great deal of my life overseas, and particularly in areas of conflict, it felt like Eliza had accompanied me for much of it. Yet I think her work moves beyond the specific and touches on the universal struggling to be - and because we are - only human. B.