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The Lost Child: Ozark Poems

Winner of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Poetry!


In this award-winning volume inspired by the impending death of his mother, Wesley McNair, long a poet of New England places, takes a new path, exploring her homeplace in the Ozarks of Southern Missouri. The linked poems of the book describe characters and events with the small, telling details for which McNair is noted, yet it also includes large themes: hope, delusion, family struggles, and lost selves. But the most important theme of all is reconciliation, as McNair attempts through these poems to know and understand his mother. Combining humor, sorrow, and his singular gift for narrative, this is McNair's most ambitious and moving collection, showing yet again why Philip Levine has called him one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.