Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965–2016

The Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning poetry collection: “Fifty years' worth of daring, revelatory poems.” ―Garth Greenwell, Bookforum

Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.

Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.”

Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2017 is a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.

“Sublime . . . Mesmerizing . . . Heroic.” —Major Jackson, The New York Times Book Review

“A fraught song of the self, composed of subtleties and exclamations.” ―Hilton Als, The New Yorker

© 2025 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9780374715182

Fecha de lanzamiento

Ebook: 14 de marzo de 2025