A Night in the Country

The poems in A Night in the Country contain poignant inquiries into the satisfactions that images provide, or fail to provide, in our mental and emotional lives. The poet imagines Renaissance painters at work; tries out various self-portraits with animals; resolves discrete images of daily life with an acknowledgement of the passionate distances and trade-offs involved in making art…In other words, the image houses the mixed feelings and unprovable intuitions that express the lyric impulse: “The mind goes back, the heart goes with it, the forest/whirls all around.” Laura Newbern’s poetry is the more remarkable because it makes these instances feel at once piercing and abidingly generous.

— Sandra Lim

There’s a voice in this voice. You never want it to stop. But it’s I who stopped, then quietly: I love these poems. Read this book. It will baffle. And get you through.

—Marianne Boruch