The Book of What Stays (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist’s wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? The old woman who refuses to leave her home in Chernobyl? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep. And here, in Crews’s finely wrought, deeply felt poems, is their testimony. For any of us, what stays? James Crews writes of the love and lives that, whatever the loss or cost, we must hold and keep