In the Wake of Home

In poems that search, name, nab, and unsettle, Christian McEwen excavates loss—and discovers evidence of love. Many of the poems make poignant use of the rich iambic throb and dangerous lilt of nursery rhyme, while others follow instinct and let mystery do the singing. A toddler left to a “hot smear of sunlight,” a woman watching her hands “like other people’s children,” another crying “Give me the bloody lunch that is your heart”—I am grateful for these voices’ testimony, fierce and gentle.

In the Wake of Home is a volume of acute tenderness: for a father’s drinking, a sister’s death by drowning, a brother’s suicide, a lover found and lost, and above all for the vulnerable child self that remains alive in the grown woman who seeks “a way to praise.” With a deft music at times lyric, at times analytic, mordant and comic, Christian McEwen’s poetry touches what’s most inward in us.