Wideawake Field - Tapa dura

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.

Eliza Griswold is a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University.