Hindsight
Poems
Will be published approx. on 24. October 2025
Book
Hardback
96 pages
978-1-324-11695-0 (ISBN)
Description
Hindsight arises from a tormented time in our country's history. Some poems contemplate the shocks of the COVID-19 assault. Others consider our nation, which is torn to pieces politically. The poems in this collection attempt to find a language to describe the breakage.
But political fracture occurs because of more fundamental dislocations: for this book, most crucially, spiritual. A search for forms of the sacred drives the whole collection. It's a book of questions, not answers. In places, it struggles with the Christian story of sacrifice and crucifixion: a heretical attempt to make sense of suffering and of aggression. "Offices" and "Concerning ceremonies" borrow Christian liturgy to chart an experience of learning compassion. Each poem asks some version of the driving question from "Dead Flowers": "What can be made of all this / grief." Other poems turn to Judaism and Buddhism to see what wisdom they offer.
Beneath theology pulses the private life. These poems look into a personal past and try to weigh the moral meaning of experience. In "Hindsight," the speaker discovers, "I could have / seen you better, I / know that now." Who have we been as we struggled to grow up? Whom have we hurt? What does it mean to be conscious?
Hindsight elegantly embraces life writ large-larger than we are, sometimes violent, sometimes harshly beautiful-as ongoing instruction, in turn leaving the reader with a lyrical compass for orientation in our troubled moment.
But political fracture occurs because of more fundamental dislocations: for this book, most crucially, spiritual. A search for forms of the sacred drives the whole collection. It's a book of questions, not answers. In places, it struggles with the Christian story of sacrifice and crucifixion: a heretical attempt to make sense of suffering and of aggression. "Offices" and "Concerning ceremonies" borrow Christian liturgy to chart an experience of learning compassion. Each poem asks some version of the driving question from "Dead Flowers": "What can be made of all this / grief." Other poems turn to Judaism and Buddhism to see what wisdom they offer.
Beneath theology pulses the private life. These poems look into a personal past and try to weigh the moral meaning of experience. In "Hindsight," the speaker discovers, "I could have / seen you better, I / know that now." Who have we been as we struggled to grow up? Whom have we hurt? What does it mean to be conscious?
Hindsight elegantly embraces life writ large-larger than we are, sometimes violent, sometimes harshly beautiful-as ongoing instruction, in turn leaving the reader with a lyrical compass for orientation in our troubled moment.
Reviews / Votes
"Rosanna Warren's Hindsight is a work of poly-perspective wonder. The rare prismatic vividness of her language brings to life, in an increasingly turbulent world, the strange beauty of childhood and aging, renewal and expiration, melancholy, grief and outrage. There is an exacting intimacy to her way of examining these tremors, a felt realism that refuses to fall into despair and cynicism; her lyric protest does not take an ironic distance or, worse, relies on virtuosic rhetoric to question intensely "things done from those undone." Through their compact image and taut music and their rich line-indepthness, these poems craft a different kind of dissent, that of humility, patience, penitence, and, above all, love. Hindsight amounts to an "an enormous fugue," a secular interlocking of Matins and Compline that compel many returns, poems that remain in the body and help sing against the overlap of personal and civic crises." -- Ishion Hutchinson, author of Fugitive Tilts "Rosanna Warren's Hindsight is a book of insight, with crickets, bears, and rat snakes in the shadows. Out of our silence, our chafing, and our bile, she has written a book of luminous wisdom and starlight." -- Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 "Rosanna Warren's poems comfort the reader with a tough and tenacious love. They place curiosity and aesthetic judgment at the heart of the poem, rendering America with the spirited energy of Tintoretto and the soulful grit of the Rolling Stones. These are poems that can walk you home on a dark, mean night. They'll light the path, they'll sharpen your sight." -- Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke: PoemsMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 201 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
227 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-324-11695-0 (9781324116950)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Rosanna Warren is the author of Hindsight and six previous volumes of poetry and is a professor emerita in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She lives in New York City.