Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Part One

1—Stories
2—Stars
3—Wisdom
4—Parable: Horse
5—Mrs. Brewster’ Second Grade Class Picture
6—Furniture
7—Water-Ski
8—Leaf Blowers
9—Parable: Heaven
10—Good Days

Part Two: Sixteen Sonnets for Isabel

1—Monochrome
2—Song
3—Technology
4—Skyrocket
5—Lizard
6—Swap Shop
7—Alien Skin
8—Pain
9—Niagara Falls
10—The Wide Variety
11—Skin
12—Never
13—Casserole
14—Inexplicably
15—Prague
16—Gardens

Part Three

1—The Miracle of Birth
2— The Inquisitor
3—Fly
4—The Poet’s Disregard
5—Parable: Gratitude
6—Sincerity
7—Statistical Norm
8—Turd
9—Parable: Friendship
10—The Dark Uncertainty
11—No Simple Thing

Part Four: Reversals

1—Narrative
2—Determination
3—Jump
4—What Happened?
5—Philosophy
6—Melodrama
7—Exercise
8—Failure
9—Constantine XI
10—Literature
11—Jism
12—Valencia
13—Thanks

Part Five

1—Persephone, Etc.
2—Crazy Times
3—Parable: Fan/Paranoia
4—Winter Wind
5—So It Happens
6—Tinsel
7—Parable: Poetry
8—Scale
9—Recognitions
10—Laugh

Promotional Information

FFF co-op available.

Galleys available: national mailing to key review/media outlets 4-5 months prior to publication.

National advertising: Poets & Writers magazine, American Poets magazine, Rain Taxi, and Redactions.

National print campaign: 100 finished books will be mailed to key review outlets, specifically targeting Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Rumpus, Huffington Post Poetry, etc.

Fall announcements will be submitted to Publishers Weekly.

Will pitch the author for readings and events at regional bookstores, festivals, trade shows, etc.

Blurb endorsements from Carl Dennis, Thomas Lux, Major Jackson, and Rodney Jones.

Online/social media campaign: Extensive promotion through BOA's website and blog; Facebook (6,300+ contacts), Twitter (5,500 followers), Instagram (1,200+ followers), and Pinterest (500+ followers) accounts; print and e-postcards; print and e-materials; and print and e-catalogs.

Electronic postcards to announce book publication will be sent to academic contacts, bookstore contacts, and literary bloggers.

Electronic newsletter feature will be emailed to BOA's database of 5,500+ contacts.

Ebook will be available at the same time as print publication to maximize sales. Ebook ISBN will be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed. Publisher and author will be promoting both e and p through social media.

Author will attend the AWP Conference 2017 in Washington, DC, where he will have an author signing.

Dobyns is well-known at such bookstores as: Grolier Bookstore (Cambridge, MA); Savoy Bookshop and Café (Westerly, RI); Bank Square Books (Mystic, CT); the Westerly, RI, Library; and Mystic Arts Café (Mystic, CT).

Promotion through the author's email and Facebook account.

About the Author

Stephen Dobyns is the author of 23 novels, including the popular "Saratoga" crime novels, 14 books of poetry, one book of short stories, and two collections of essays on poetry. His books of poetry include Winter's Journey (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); Mystery, So Long (2005); The Porcupine's Kisses (2002); Do They Have a Reason? (2000); Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (Penguin, 1999); Common Carnage (1996); Velocities: New and Selected Poems 1966-1992 (1994); Cemetery Nights (1987), which won a Melville Cane Award; Black Dog, Red Dog (1984), which was a winner in the National Poetry Series; Heat Death (1980); and Concurring Beasts (1972), which was the 1972 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. His novels include Boy in the Water (Holt/Metropolitan, 1999); The Church of Dead Girls (1997); Saratoga Fleshpot (1995); The Wrestler's Cruel Study (1993); and Saratoga Haunting (1993). His novels have been translated into more than ten languages. Among his many honors and awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Dobyns has worked as a reporter for Detroit News, and has written review for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Times Literary Supplement. He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University. He currently lives in Westerly, Rhode Island.

Reviews

"Stephen Dobyns is a rare breed, an award-winning poet and a crime novelist whom Stephen King praises." --Boston Globe "Poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns brings to us a poignant collection about love, life, and the slow wisdom that 'all stories are sad when they reach their end.' ... Dobyns, whose earlier poetry collections have won prestigious awards including the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and the Melville Cain Award from the Poetry Society of America, becomes, in this elegiac collection, a poet attempting at truth, even its most painful and even selfish admissions. Largely confessional in nature, Dobyns's exercise in grief is one to be witnessed." --Rain Taxi "[A collection of] courageous observations about the way one endures as he considers big questions about death--of his love, his friends, and himself. [Dobyns] never hides from the tragic and the honest... While this may not be a book about marriage, it is certainly about the lessons the poet has learned through marriage, which he may well be more reflective about now that his wife has passed. Sprinkled throughout the collection are a half-dozen parable poems, offering more lessons and contemplation of them. Dobyns's brave and sincere poems will remind readers of their own humanness." --Booklist "All of the poems are unflinchingly beautiful as Dobyns explores the transience of life on earth. These are poems for those who respect honesty. Dobyns is a poet who is true to the script God offers a fallen humanity... As a whole, Stephen Dobyns's The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech is poetry by a man daring to look death squarely in the eye. He is a poet of great courage as he broods on life and death. His relentless imagination erodes the power of death's presence and makes of it a lesser reality. Reading Dobyns, one is not alone with the inevitable outcome of our birth. The beauty of his language knocks death from its pedestal." --The Journal "This new book by Stephen Dobyns is one of the rare books of poems that actually deserves the adjective 'unflinching.' The poems focus on the hard truth of what it means to live in time, to feel that what we love is destined to vanish and that the truths we rely on to bear us forward may prove ephemeral. Instead of skirting the facts by acts of self-removal or by focusing on issues more tractable, the poems give us the front-line news from the disaster zone. In their determination not to deceive or be deceived, they counter the temptation to helplessness by a continuous enactment of courage and honesty. And by their refusing to be jaded or self-pitying, by reaching out to create a large cast of characters, presented in a wide variety of genres, they include us in their circle of concern. Dark as they often are, they leave us strengthened and enlarged." --Carl Dennis "Stephen Dobyns' poems have never been of the Tower, nor do they belong in the parlor. Instead, he has struck me, for over forty years, as a poet of great courage and a restless, relentless imagination. He never, never stops trying to do the impossible: to tell the truth. This is a book of mature brilliance." --Thomas Lux "The Day's Last Light returns us to the origins of poetry: story and song. For nearly four decades, Dobyns has written poetry that interrupts the deadening machinery of our invention to reassert the primacy of human relations and the remnants of wisdom we gain that alight our radiant journeys, which makes him one of America's most relevant and treasured poets. With characteristic wit and literary surliness, this volume continues his big soul reflections. Right now, someone is checking a math equation hoping to unite theories of relativity and black holes, but you are here with this book in your hand ready for the vigilance and proximity of a voice that is ruminative, erudite, and charged to illumine all the edges of our universe." --Major Jackson "It is time to rank Stephen Dobyns among our finest living poets, for he has written several of the strongest poetry books published in the last forty years, and The Day's Last Light is his most humanly ambitious and imaginatively evocative work to date. Specific death is his subject, the death of his great love, his friends, and his own. His vision reminds one of Shakespeare, hedgeless, unremittingly tragic, but tempered by his absurdist, metaphysical wit, brilliant metaphor, and pragmatism. He never panders, never pumps the emotion. Every poem says, here is this man, inside and out, and the best of them, 'Sixteen Sonnets for Isabel' and 'Laugh,' his superb portrait of a dying Hayden Carruth, are redemptive." --Rodney Jones "For more than four decades, I have been reading indelible poems by Stephen Dobyns and learning from them--about the world, our human dilemma, and the capacity of poetry. Sui generis, he has not yet been sufficiently recognized for his crucial contributions to American letters, particularly his early mastery of narrative, metaphor, and humor, in poems that were always unafraid of conventions. What most I treasure in this new collection is how, like Prospero, he puts aside his magical powers in the sonnet sequence for Isabel, giving us an unadorned, idiomatic record of grief that is both heartbroken and heartbreaking." --Ellen Bryant Voigt