Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Afterlight

Afterlight

Nolen, Caleb

Paperback

Series: Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1647692989
ISBN13: 9781647692988
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Published: Jul 24 2026
Pages: 64
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.30
Language: English

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.

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