From acclaimed poet and critic Meghan O'Rourke comes a powerful collection about the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. These formally ambitious poems and lyric essays give voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. A Paterson Poetry Prize finalist, Sun in Days is unsentimental yet deeply felt, characterized by O'Rourke's signature lyric precision and force of observation.

Selections from the "Pandemic Files" published by The Yale Review, the preeminent journal of literature and ideas

“If only our response to the pandemic on other fronts could have been as speedy and potent as this literary one.”―Kirkus Reviews, starred review

In beautifully written and powerfully thought prose, A World Out of Reach offers a crucial record of COVID-19 and the cataclysmic spring of 2020―a record for us and for posterity―in the arresting voices of poets, essayists, scholars, and health care workers. Ranging from matters of policy and social justice to ancient history and personal stories of living under lockdown, this vivid compilation from The Yale Review presents a first draft of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent history.

Meghan O'Rourke was thirty-two when her mother died of cancer on Christmas Day, 2008. As a writer, even in the depths of her grief, she was fascinated by what she observed of herself in the aftermath: the rage she felt, not only at what had happened to her mother, but also at the inability of people to acknowledge her pain; her sense that the meaning of her life had changed fundamentally with the loss of a parent; the way that the reassuringly familiar often became somehow completely new and strange. The Long Goodbye interleaves personal recollections of her much-loved mother with an examination of what it means to grieve in a society which no longer has the rituals - or even, most of the time, the desire - to engage with grief, to understand it, and to let it do both its worst - and its best.

The incandescent poems in Once, the second collection by an astonishing and formidable poet, explore loss, violence, and recovery. Facing a mother s impending death, O Rourke invokes a vanished childhood of American houses, wet / kids moving through them in Spandex bathing suits; / inside, sandwiches with crusts cut off. But the future hangs ominously over this summer paradise: not just the death of O Rourke s mother but the stark civic traumas faced by American citizens in the twenty-first century. The future, O Rourke writes, is all still / a dream, a night sweat to be swum off / in a wonderland of sand and bread. These poems are shadowed by illness, both civic and personal, and by the mysterious currents of grief. What emerges over the course of the volume is a meditation not only on a daughter s relationship with her mother but also on a citizen s to her nation. Throughout, Once examines the forces that shape war, divorce, and death, exploring personal culpability and charting uncertain new beginnings as the speakers seek to build homes in a shattered land and find whole selves amid broken, thwarted relationships.

from "Frontier" . . . At times, I felt sick, intoxicated by BPA and mercury. At other times I fasted and the stars stumbled clear from the vault. Up there, the universe stands around drunk. I hope the Lord is kind to us, for we engrave our every mistake . . ."

The insomniac speakers in Halflife are coming of age in a mythical world full of threat and promise. Seeking their true selves amid the fallen cathedrals of America, they speak wryly of destructive love affairs, aesthetic obsession, and encroaching war, but refuse to abandon hope in the power of imagination.

From the acclaimed poet and critic Meghan O'Rourke comes a powerful collection about the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. In formally ambitious poems and lyric essays, Sun in Days gives voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. Wresting a recuperative beauty from one's days, O'Rourke traces an arc from loss and illness to the life force of pregnancy and motherhood. Along the way, she investigates a newfound existential awareness of all that vanishes. This is O'Rourke's most ambitious book to date: unsentimental yet deeply felt, and characterized by the lyric precision and force of observation for which her work is known. From "Idiopathic Illness" What can be said? I came w/o a warranty, Stripped of me-or me-ish-ness- I was a will in a subpar body. I waxed toward all that waned inside.