This volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age
“Mothman Apologia . . . hits a lilting, Larry Levis-esque register, both elegiac and witty.”—Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, “The Best Poetry of 2022”
“These poems name the hurt wrought upon the meek that makes the elegy, here, as much an exaltation of the living as a mournful dirge for the land.”—Major Jackson, Vanderbilt University
Robert Wood Lynn’s collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less. Comprising poems of place set across the Virginias, this collection includes an episodic elegy exploring the opioid crisis in the Shenandoah Valley as well as a separate series of persona poems reimagining the Mothman (West Virginia’s famed cryptid) reluctantly coming of age in that state’s mountains and struggling with the utility of warnings. These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.
- ISBN10 030026108X
- ISBN13 9780300261080
- Publish Date 14 June 2022 (first published 10 May 2022)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 August 2023
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 120
- Language English
- URL http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780300261080