Best Seller
Strange Light
Hardcover
$30.00
Available on Apr 06, 2027 | 128 Pages
From award-winning poet Seán Hewitt, writer of the critically acclaimed All Down Darkness Wide and Open, Heaven, comes a remarkable collection of poems that illuminate the gaps between love and its loss, familiarity and estrangement, happiness and grief
In Strange Light, Seán Hewitt conjures a world on the border of the physical and the spiritual, a world where men meet in the woods at night, where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories, and encounters. In this world there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. There are elegies for the poet’s father and paeans to the relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world, vespers and hymns, even a few works that attempt to propel themselves into transcendence.
By turns reverent and profane, beautiful and terrifying, to read Strange Light is to fall into its trance, a deep delirium of hypnotic rapture where everything is called into question, where fragility is allied with strength, and violence is both harnessed and unleashed. Hewitt has delivered a singular collection of poetry that leads us through the darkness—from the deep woods of forbidden love and illicit secrets—into a clearing of tenderness and reawakening.
In Strange Light, Seán Hewitt conjures a world on the border of the physical and the spiritual, a world where men meet in the woods at night, where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories, and encounters. In this world there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. There are elegies for the poet’s father and paeans to the relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world, vespers and hymns, even a few works that attempt to propel themselves into transcendence.
By turns reverent and profane, beautiful and terrifying, to read Strange Light is to fall into its trance, a deep delirium of hypnotic rapture where everything is called into question, where fragility is allied with strength, and violence is both harnessed and unleashed. Hewitt has delivered a singular collection of poetry that leads us through the darkness—from the deep woods of forbidden love and illicit secrets—into a clearing of tenderness and reawakening.
Author
Seán Hewitt
SEÁN HEWITT’s debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the U.K. and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Seán is Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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