First published 2025
Brad Leithauser brings readers into his world at sixty-six, where a single bite of food in Tokyo catapults him back through decades of memory. The poet moves between his present self and his younger incarnations at twenty-seven, then eight years old, watching a lone jet overhead in wonder. He visits a three-year-old's declaration "I love you so loud" in "A Young Farewell" and contemplates relationships "Forty-Five Years On." The collection unfolds like a five-act play, moving from conversational poems to dramatic endings. In "Darker" sections, people learn to say goodbye. "Lighter" moments introduce "Icarus and His Kid Brother" alongside playful dactyls, quatrains, and reflections on sobriety. Leithauser balances off-rhymes with traditional forms, creating poems that are both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thoughtful. At its heart, this collection asks whether life's brightest events might be "strung along a long old current," connecting past and present in unexpected ways.
Genres: contemporary, poetry, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, nonlinear-narrative
Setting: Tokyo
Period: 1950s, 1960s, 2020s
96 pages · Hardcover · Knopf