Up Late: Poems

A revelatory collection from a poet praised for “a truth-telling that’s political, existential, and above all, emotional” (Terrance Hayes).

The poems in Nick Laird’s fifth volume, Up Late, reflect on the strange and chaotic times we live in. Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity and the banalities and distortions of modern living, the poet confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. At the book’s heart lies the Forward Prize–winning title sequence, a moving and profound meditation on a father’s dying, the reverberations of which echo throughout in poems that interrogate inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retrieved.

From “Up Late”
You could never let anything go, a trait
I also suffer from, and kind of admire, but
this is not a possibility. The tick of the clock
is meltwater dripping into the fissure.