In the Still of the Night

By Dara Wier

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• “That’s how one human leaves us” ends the first poem of Dara Wier’s startling new collection, a surprisingly raw and fluid exploration of grief. Wier records her thoughts with clarity and immediacy, showing us the unraveling and reconstruction of her world and consciousness after a significant loss.

  Named a Best Poetry Book 2017 by Publishers Weekly

  **Bundle the fall 2017 titles and get 40% off**

• With her typical subtle and eloquent emotionality, Wier offers up harmonious meditations on disquieting themes. . . . Without pedantry or obfuscation, Wier’s lines cohere into a philosophical discourse about the poet’s relationship with the world.
  Publishers Weekly, starred review

  Wier's book of poems defy convention in ways that are surprising... she seems to privilege the musicality of language above a poem's content throughout the book, and in these moments, the senselessness (and speechlessness) of loss is finally voiced.
  Lani Yu, Gulf Coast

  The book that made the biggest impact on me this year was Dara Wier's In the Still of the Night. The poems in this book are powerfully grief-stricken, yet they convey such a sense of the expansive possibilities of the imagination and poetry, that the grief becomes a source of inspiration. The austerity never tips into piousness and is in fact sometimes offset by a life-affirming goofiness. In these profoundly retrograde times, it is deeply gratifying to see poetry not as a cudgel but a light.
  Dean Young, Minnesota Public Radio

• Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including In the Still of the Night (forthcoming from Wave Books, 2017) You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013), Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009), Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005, 2006 SFSU Poetry Center Book Award), Hat On a Pond (Verse Press, 2002), and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). Also among her works are the limited editions (X In Fix) in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm Series, Fly on the Wall (Oat City Press), and The Lost Epic, co-written with James Tate (Waiting for Godot Books, 1999). Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the American Poetry Review. In 2005 she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.
  
  Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, The Fairytale Review, Hollins Critic, jubilat, New American Writing, slope and Volt, among other magazines.
  
  She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-directs the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. Each June she teaches a poetry workshop for the Juniper Summer Institute. Her editing work includes publishing limited edition chapbooks and broadsides with Factory Hollow Press, North Amherst, Massachusetts, a small independent press she co-edits with Emily Pettit and Guy Pettit. Along with James Haug and James Tate she has edited the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Series for poetry.