Laura Newbern, Author and Poet

Laura Newbern

Poet • Author • Teacher 

Laura Newbern, A Night in the Country

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.

Laura Newbern, Love and the Eye

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

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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

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A NIGHT IN THE COUNTRY

Poetry’s impossible objectives—permanence, the dream of perfection—haunt these poems... 

LOUISE GLÜCK

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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

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LOVE AND THE EYE

Love and the Eye is playful and grave, wry and intimate, self-deprecating and passionate...

Reginald Gibbons

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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... 

JERICHO BROWN

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LOVE AND THE EYE

Here is a voice that will stay with you long after the book is closed and safely on your shelf...

Alice Friman