Wideawake Field

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.

Author: Eliza Griswold
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: 04/29/2008
Pages: 88
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.27lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.57w x 0.33d
ISBN: 9780374531300

About the Author

Eliza Griswold is the recipient of the first Robert I. Friedman Prize in Investigative Journalism and is a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University, where she is at work on a nonfiction book, The Tenth Parallel, also to be published by FSG.