Afterlight

"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 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

"The poems in Afterlight ask to be read in one sitting, to become immersed in the world that Caleb Nolen has (re)created. The poems circle around a handful of characters, some from Nolen's childhood, some from the Bible, and what is amazing is how each speaks to the other across time, how a dead friend can become Mark, how the speaker can become Judas. I am reminded of Larry Levis, of Richard Siken, in the way Nolen can narrate a life—grounding us in the mundane while reaching toward the sublime. The tension of revisiting those days ('those aisles of comedy and horror') shimmers from every page. These poems have the power of transformation built into them, always aware of the awful responsibility that invokes."—Nick Flynn, author of Low

"An exquisitely melancholy book grounded in the wounding rapture of brooding on all that has been left behind: childhood, a religion, now dead friends, a place that no longer feels the same because you yourself are not the same. These are remarkably intimate and clear-eyed poems about the past that we won't—even can't—let go even as we try to sidle away from it."—Brian Evenson, author of Open Curtain

"MySpace, Slipknot, 'smoking weed/ out of a Dr. Pepper can'; random violence, God, and friendship. Caleb Nolen's Afterlight is a book of poems that read like linked stories about growing up in a rural American landscape starving for human value. How poetry found this poet is part of the mystery he invites us to consider: 'No one gave me this task. It has been/useless for a thousand years.' In plainspoken, subtly measured and enjambed lines, Nolen recounts a prodigal son's story, where religion (Christianity) is both the poison and the way the world is recovered. By the time we get to the heart-breaking poem 'The Deal,' we understand the stakes of this collection: 'I swore that if he showed himself/ just this one time, I'd never ask for anything again.'"—Nate Klug, author of Hosts and Guests