This volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age   “Elegiac and witty.�—Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, “The Best Poetry of 2022�   “These poems name the hurt wrought upon the meek that makes the elegy, here, as much an exaltation of the living as a mournful dirge for the land.�—Major Jackson, Vanderbilt University   The 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Robert Wood Lynn’s collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less. Comprising poems of place set across the Virginias, this collection includes an episodic elegy exploring the opioid crisis in the Shenandoah Valley as well as a separate series of persona poems reimagining the Mothman (West Virginia’s famed cryptid) reluctantly coming of age in that state’s mountains and struggling with the utility of warnings. These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.

As Americans, we like to see ourselves as a "giving" peple, willing to support religious and secular efforts through our contributions of time and money. But for all its popularity, what does this framing concept of stewardship mean for our giving? How did we come to rely so entirely on this idea? What can we discover through a look back to its origins? Can a fuller understanding of stewardship prompt us to fresh thinking about our own giving? This is a tale of the American Protestant search for money and meaning in giving, drawing on historical texts to tell a story that has been largely hidden from view. The story is told through the writingss of key figures-pastors, lay leaders, thinkers, novelists, fundraisers-spanning American life for the past two centuries. Through introductory essays, Robert W. Lynn, a respected historian of giving traditions in Protestantism, sets these voices in their broader social context. This is a story specific to Protestant congregations, yet relevant to many other American organizations as well. It is above all the story of a great pressure to raise funds-an "amazing pressure," in the apt description of one 19th century church leader, Jeremiah Evarts-and of the struggles of Evarts and others to reconcile their fundraising with their faith through differing visions of giving. The authors hope that listening to these lesser known but compelling voices and understanding the context in which they lived and worked may serve to nourish our own imaginations about giving.