Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn't speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
The experience of reading Afterlight was a rare one for me. I couldn’t stop turning the pages. It is a propulsive, almost primal read; grief, longing, sorrow, and sympathy swelled inside me, bursts of feeling I did not expect and could not control.
Jennifer T. Chang, from the foreword
These spare, unadorned poems open in the fissures of memory. Childhood and adolescence in particular are explored via emotional snapshots that are both tough and immensely tender. One of the most remarkable things about this poet is an absolute clarity that transcends the literal, which gives him big range and authority. The book is wholly original in that the poems travel all the way back to the origins of what they confront, including brilliant forays into matters of religion and the subtle underlying violence of a rough childhood. More than a few of these poems moved me deeply. This is the strongest first book I’ve read in a very long time.
Chase Twichell, author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been
Caleb Nolen’s Afterlight chronicles a harrowing adolescence, reviewed retrospectively in the light of a faith that illuminates but will neither explain nor assuage. Rarely do I encounter poems written with such styptic care. Suspended between exorcism and elegy, each of these poems is a razor held in a living hand, waiting for the what-comes-next but already caught in the what-comes-after.
G.C. Waldrep, author of The Opening Ritual
About the Author
Caleb Nolen’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Bat City Review, Fence, The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has received support from Blue Mountain Center and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Table of Contents
Reunion
I.
Blackout
Letter to Cain
Reprieve
Letter to Abel
John's Parents
Letter to Mary of Oignies
First Gun
Mondegreen
II.
Late Vigil
Homecoming
Molotov
Black Friday
Waking Dream
Last Rites
Ode
Open Water
Afterlight
Letter to Job
The Deal
III.
Jonah Years
Killing the Fattened Calf
Working Out
Study Hour
Letter to the Woman Taken in Adultery
Updated Portrait in a Grocery Store
Letter to Paul the Apostle
Night Drives on PA-26
Letter to Bobby
Mondegreen
Letter to Judas
Reprieve
Listen
Letter to the Man Possessed by Demons
Appendix: Hagiographies
Notes
Acknowledgments
