Last Word by Douglas Haynes

The poems of Douglas Haynes are delicately sculpted, compassionate, and smart. He’s a poet of bright imagination and considerable charm, with a discerning eye for details both startling and suggestive. His poems are fearless in taking on the body’s startling revelations, the way the corporal self “remembers/like summer dusk/in a northern country/where evening’s broken skin/blurs the horizon.” This is a book of hard-won beauty and wisdom, the kind of poetry readers can embrace with their full hearts.

–Allison Joseph, author of My Father’s Kites and recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize

In Douglas Haynes’s Last Word, we are reminded that there are no enchiridia when we are dealing in full measure with the hollowness of a marriage or cancer, which “lurks like a toothy beast behind every tree.” In Haynes’s poems of beauty and ponderance, we are shown that while metaphor isn’t always enough, it is sometimes necessary to move us closer to the hue and feel, the scale and pitch, of the unutterable and elusive.

–Abayomi Animashaun, author of The Giving of Pears and Sailing for Ithaca