AFTERLIGHT
Winner of the 2025 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
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“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn't speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
Advance praise:
The experience of reading Afterlight was a rare one for me. I couldn’t stop turning the pages. It is a propulsive, almost primal read; grief, longing, sorrow, and sympathy swelled inside me, bursts of feeling I did not expect and could not control.
-- Jennifer Chang, from the foreword
The poems in Afterlight ask to be read in one sitting, to become immersed in the world that Caleb Nolen has (re)created. The poems circle around a handful of characters, some from Nolen’s childhood, some from the Bible, and what is amazing is how each speaks to the other across time, how a dead friend can become Mark, how the speaker can become Judas. I am reminded of Larry Levis, of Richard Siken, in the way Nolen can narrate a life―grounding us in the mundane while reaching toward the sublime. The tension of revisiting those days ('those aisles of comedy and horror') shimmers from every page. These poems have the power of transformation built into them, always aware of the awful responsibility that invokes.
-- Nick Flynn, author of Low
These spare, unadorned poems open in the fissures of memory. Childhood and adolescence in particular are explored via emotional snapshots that are both tough and immensely tender. One of the most remarkable things about this poet is an absolute clarity that transcends the literal, which gives him big range and authority. The book is wholly original in that the poems travel all the way back to the origins of what they confront, including brilliant forays into matters of religion and the subtle underlying violence of a rough childhood. More than a few of these poems moved me deeply. This is the strongest first book I’ve read in a very long time.
-- Chase Twichell, author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been
Caleb Nolen’s Afterlight chronicles a harrowing adolescence, reviewed retrospectively in the light of a faith that illuminates but will neither explain nor assuage. Rarely do I encounter poems written with such styptic care. Suspended between exorcism and elegy, each of these poems is a razor held in a living hand, waiting for the what-comes-next but already caught in the what-comes-after.
-- G.C. Waldrep, author of The Opening Ritual
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