Wideawake Field

The chairs have come in
and the crisp yellow thwock
of the ball being hit
says somehow, now that it's fall,
I'm a memory of myself.
My whole old life--
I mourn you sometimes
in places you would have been.
--October

The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds--the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places-- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in Wideawake Field sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.

Eliza Griswold is the recipient of the first Robert I. Friedman Prize in Investigative Journalism and is a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University, where she is at work on a nonfiction book, The Tenth Parallel, also to be published by FSG.