“In It’s Late, Colin Drohan limns and details a nostalgia quite possibly unique to our moment: that is, a nostalgia for the unlikeness and fragility of the imminent future. He has found a still point from which to love and lament what is certain to happen. His is a radiant stillness.”
—Donald Revell, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, author of Canandaigua: Poems
“The speaker in these poems is incredibly winning—as wounded, as worried about the future of the planet as the rest of us, but a little more clever. There’s a disarming easiness to how these poems move, and like Schuyler they find a painful beauty in daily life. You know how sometimes you start reading a book and you realize right away you’re in good hands, and you can relax while the poet slowly breaks your heart because they’ll do it so carefully, so well? This is one of those books.”
—Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants
“How do you thank a kind-hearted messenger who’s giving you the bad news? Colin Drohan’s It’s Late brings as intimate a voice as any voice made of words is, which is as intimate as a voice can be, like a welcome whisper inside your ear by a voice whose heart you know and trust. It’s not too late to stop what you’re doing to read what happens when someone asks himself, 'what happened to him' and still wants, as John Ashbery suggests in his poem 'Soonest Mended' that it’s wise to want 'to be small and clear and free.' Drohan accepts his 'duties as the ghost town’s ethnographer / effective immediately.' He confides 'I don’t know how to do justice / to a tree. I just wanted to talk / to you about it all.' Lucky for us. It’s Late introduces us to a poet to take with us through a lifetime.”
—Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier), author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina
“A rare debut that’s both bold and tender, deeply considered yet wrought with quicksilver urgency, Drohan’s voice is one of one, entirely his own, but like our finer poets, it springs from a well of elders and ancestors. In other words, it both comes from and with people. How lucky we are for its immense arrival.”
—Ocean Vuong, MacArthur Fellow in Literature, author of The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel
“It’s Late is a luminous, quietly devastating debut that meets a fractured world with attentiveness, wit, and deep emotional intelligence. Drohan’s spirited poetry moves with an unforced intimacy, inviting readers into moments of grief, humor, and astonishment that feel both urgently contemporary and timeless. Whether listening to trees, walking among ghosts, or reckoning with memory and loss, these poems never look away—they linger, question, and stay. These wondrous poems feel like walking beside someone at dusk: thoughtful, vulnerable, and awake to everything that still flickers.”
—Peter Gizzi, author of Fierce Elegy
“In ‘The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing,’ the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič argues that the end of the world is no longer on the horizon—it has already begun. Zupančič's title would make a fitting subtitle for Drohan's It's Late, an understated study of the human subject absorbed in the everyday while the apocalypse unfolds around it. The collection's central revelation—that the end of the world is experienced as though it is not occurring—is brilliantly rendered throughout this breathtaking debut. As Drohan writes in ‘You Expected from the World’: ‘We didn't understand / The beginning was the end / The song on the radio says / We'll all be gone by fall.’ It's Late is the book about the end—which is to say, our contemporary moment—we have been waiting for.”
—Cynthia Cruz, author of Sweet Repetition
