Low explores the jaggedness of memory and what is salvageable when the past is broken by loss, violence, and trauma. Punctuating Nick Flynn's signature lyric poems are prose pieces and sequences, veering toward essays, including "Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger's Apartment," a truly strange experience of cataloging a deceased neighbor's belongings and how quickly they become worthless; "Notes on Thorns & Blood," a study of time and wounds; and "Notes on a Year of Corona," a loose sonnet crown about the early stages of the pandemic and the unrest after racist police violence. Despite its existential reverberations, Low is a celebration of desire in all its forms-the desire for home, the desire to be held, the desire for people to be kind to one another, the desire to understand where we are from and what we can do to make the best of that. But how do we create a home, these poems ask, in a world of satellites and atom bombs and algorithms, those things designed to dehumanize and reduce us? To get low is to reconnect with the earth, to engage with the emotional state of the planet, to remember that "the cure all along grows beside us." Flynn's collection is a prismatic, even prophetic, experience, with new complexity and ardor at every turn.

"Nobody bends a lyric the way Flynn does to break the heart."-Washington Independent Review of Books

About the Author
Nick Flynn is the author of five previous poetry books, including I Will Destroy You and Some Ether, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and four memoirs, including Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He lives in Brooklyn.


Book Information
ISBN 9781644452592
Author Nick Flynn
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Graywolf Press,U.S.
Publisher Graywolf Press,U.S.
Weight(grams) 174g
Dimensions(mm) 208mm * 140mm * 11mm