Mothman Apologia: Volume 116

This volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age

"Elegiac and witty."--Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2022"

"These poems name the hurt wrought upon the meek that makes the elegy, here, as much an exaltation of the living as a mournful dirge for the land."--Major Jackson, Vanderbilt University

The 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Robert Wood Lynn's collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less. Comprising poems of place set across the Virginias, this collection includes an episodic elegy exploring the opioid crisis in the Shenandoah Valley as well as a separate series of persona poems reimagining the Mothman (West Virginia's famed cryptid) reluctantly coming of age in that state's mountains and struggling with the utility of warnings. These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.

Author: Robert Wood Lynn
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 03/22/2022
Pages: 120
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 9.13h x 5.98w x 0.55d
ISBN13: 9780300261073
ISBN10: 0300261071
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
Robert Wood Lynn is a writer from Virginia. His work has appeared in Antioch Review, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble.