Poetry. Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Tom Sleigh. In his new book, Jeffrey Harrison reflects on the daily familiarities and fragilities experienced in a long marriage and as a parent of teenagers, refracted through the shock of a brother's suicide. Limpid and direct on the surface but eloquent in resonance, INTO DAYLIGHT asks what comes after: How to live, how to continue writing, and how to find one's proper relationship with the world and restore some semblance of delight, while giving voice to sadness and pain.

Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast begins by considering philosophical questions arising from the experience of desire and intimacy: What does love reveal about — and make possible within — the individual? Can we ever truly understand another person’s experience of the world around them? To what extent is the other ultimately inaccessible, a world unto herself? Pillared by massive, ambitious poems in the tradition of Modernism, these lyrics imbue landscapes as varied as Greece and America with new tension, new significance, as the speaker searches for answers to these provocative questions of love and inheritance. Through her graceful curation of imagery and enviable command of narrative, Hiton ultimately transforms our understanding of history and desire.

“In The Lantern Room, her exquisite new collection, Chloe Honum moves, as her poems do, with range, precision, and astonishing beauty. Honum’s speaker travels across Arkansas motel to motel, missing a beloved, and in the book’s crown jewel, ‘The Common Room,’ chronicles an out-patient hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. The collection closes with sublime meditations on the speaker’s mother’s death: ‘How will I live without her?’ How, indeed. This book is that survival, and more than that, an extraordinary mind pressing through language to speak so deeply, so startlingly, the reader is made larger to receive its enormous gift: ‘But I have rain in my hair. This much is true. Let me bring it to you.’”
—Allison Benis Whit

A powerful sequel to The Us, which ended with the son Ay wounded, rendered silent and immobile by a head injury. In Ay, the boy is propped up and worshiped, as others project a kind of divinity onto his stillness. While Ay recovers, in a series of lyrical monologues he discovers an individual self-awareness, separate from family and tribe. “Musically rugged, riddled with insight, resonant, gripping, and chock-full of moments that startle with their vividness (‘What eats grass slow and bent- / necked, eyed from the side, is deer’) Ay deploys its fertile idiom not only for the pleasure of it, which is immeasurable, but as a medium through which to investigate the mechanics of subjectivity, grief, empathy, and forgiveness. The result is one of the most radically inventive and invigorating books of poetry I’ve read in years” — Timothy Donnelly

A work of uncanny originality, David Huddle’s nineteenth book is the account of an extraordinary death trip taken by a charismatic and beloved woman, her husband, and an astonishing number of offspring, from infants to young adults. The Faulkes Chronicle explores how children grieve, and shows how the wit and courage of even the littlest brothers and sisters can be a source of resiliance. Familial conversation composes an intimate requiem, transforming loss into comprehension. Only one of our finest writers could manage this delicate material. The Faulkes Chronicle is a brief, autumnal novel — made of momentary details yet with an encompassing grandeur.

David Huddle’s twenty-first book, Hazel is a portrait of a woman both ordinary and exceptional, composed in glimpses of her life from child to elder. Hazel is a loner and somewhat of a pill. Although she’s not likeable in the regular ways, she’s rigorously honest in the way she examines her world, and in relationships with a few other people. Hazel’s nephew John Robert is captivated by the mystery of such a uniquely serious person. He assembles episodes from Hazel’s life, and the novel reveals a lifelong struggle by someone whose integrity is absolute. Huddle proves the complete life of almost anyone would be profoundly complex if seen whole.

Maura Nelson, who has a sophisticated background in science, medicine, and programming, has stumbled upon a way to execute someone using only the computers in her home office—silently, anonymously, leaving no trace of violence, so that her target appears to have died of natural causes. Maura tests her method by eliminating Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, but this experience affects her so deeply that she doesn’t want to continue alone. She entices Jack Plymouth into a partnership to rid the world of those they decide “need to be dead.” Both a steamy romance and a cyber-thriller, My Immaculate Assassin raises disturbing and timely questions about the technology and morality of “idealistic” murder, carried out remotely.

Can we ever truly know another person, however well-loved? Brainy, decent, funny, and likeable, the members of Horace Houseman’s family and his closest friend possess quirky and compelling interior lives that they reveal to no one else. Nothing Can Make Me Do This, David Huddle’s tenth work of fiction, enters the minds of Horace, Eve, Hannah, Clara, Bill, and others over fifty years, leaping in chronology an intersecting the vantage points, in a kaleidoscopic vision of a contemporary clan (and their secrets).