Laura Newbern
Poet • Author • Teacher
A Night in the Country
By Laura Newbern
Selected by Louise Glück as Winner of the 2023 Changes Book Prize, Laura Newbern’s second collection of poetry is a work of burning, restrained urgency that looks at loss, isolation, the passage of time—and what endures despite. Written in a town that was once home to the world’s largest asylum, these poems are studies in the dual nature of that idea: asylum, always both a protection and an exile.
Love and the Eye
By Laura Newbern
“One leans into the beauty of this collection because of all the ways it does not settle down, because of all the ways it insists on seeing.”
–Claudia Rankine, 2010 First Book judge
A “lovely first collection. . . a chronicle of the observations of a self in solitude. . . taking in the world in wonder—a transformative vision in which beauty is evident everywhere.” She describes these poems as “a quiet grief like the dark edge of a cloud or field: ever- present and capable of making one who loves love harder.”
–Natasha Trethewey
LOVE AND THE EYE
One leans into the beauty of this collection because of all the ways it does not settle down, because of all the ways it insists on seeing.
Claudia Rankine
A NIGHT IN THE COUNTRY
Poetry’s impossible objectives—permanence, the dream of perfection—haunt these poems...
LOUISE GLÜCK
LOVE AND THE EYE
Shining sadness limns these poems—quiet grief like the dark edge of a cloud or field: ever-present and capable of making one who loves love harder...
Natasha Trethewey
LOVE AND THE EYE
Love and the Eye is playful and grave, wry and intimate, self-deprecating and passionate...
Reginald Gibbons
A NIGHT IN THE COUNTRY
...A Night in the Country is at once direct and mysterious, a book of declarations and decrees subsumed in the language of the fable...