Posthumous Noon

Selected by Jane Hirshfield as winner of the 2017 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, Posthumous Noon is Aaron Baker’s second full-length volume.

Posthumous Noon is a book of grief and its bearing. It is also a book of language’s largess and leaping—as all true poem-volumes must be—and a book of the treasure house of the living: of largemouth bass; of the eros of moths and of humans; of cities and fields, stories and waters. It is a book holding as well many kinds of migration: the migration of the body in illness, of love’s witness, of souls, of creatures, of aftermath. In word, music, and image, Aaron Baker confirms his book title’s promise: even amid loss’s darkness, the full dimensions of light cannot be kept from this world

—Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

Listen for what you need, Aaron Baker insists in the haunting and gorgeous new collection Posthumous Noon. In these poems there is so much that will slake: the musical delicacy of the lines, their keen sensitivity and vibrant precision in rendering the natural world, and the ferocious interplay between faith and suffering. These poems resist as they pray: Try harder/ to hear that motion within the folds of light. And in the same breath as they yearn for mending, often these wondrous poems go magnificent and stark, and bravely turn away, refuse. Because in the end, just like me, just like this terrific poet, You will be destroyed.

—Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book and Feverland: A Memoir in Shards