Wideawake Field: Poems

By Eliza Griswold

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466880672

Eliza Griswold

Eliza Griswold has written and translated five books of nonfiction and poetry (all published by FSG) and was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was also a New York Times Notable Book and Critics’ Pick. Griswold has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation, among others. She has been awarded various prizes, including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, and the Rome Prize for her poetry. Currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, she has written for The New Yorker since 2003.

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Reviews for Wideawake Field

[archangelsbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Magnificent.Terrifying. Sublime.

[jimmychanga · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I wasn't impressed with this book, I just thought it was kinda safe and boring.