Afterglow by Adrian Schnall

“’We must live a time in silence / before we can hear / cries in the trees,’ writes Adrian Schnall in this collection of humane poems that probe and search for linkages between us and our world, us and ourselves. I am grateful for these poems.”

–Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic, and a current Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets)

“In poem after poem, with tender insight and careful music, Adrian Schnall brings us into the spaces that matter most. Afterglow, informed by the poet’s many decades as a physician, attends to the body and the spirit, as when Schnall remembers, ‘The spark was there on the screen— / life dancing across it – / but none of the tiny muscles / in the heart were listening.’ These poems listen. They attend. They touch their subjects with love. In these acts, they are good medicine and more. Just as this necessary book nods deeply at our losses, it remembers how we endure, ‘how one survives / an age like this – / how one keeps alive / the fire to sing.’”

–David Swerdlow, author of Bodies on Earth and Nightstand.

 “That Afterglow is the poetry of a former physician makes sense of its precise music and its steadfast attention to detail and form. Even so, I found myself equally moved by the ways in which science can sometimes feel unavailable, especially in times of need: these poems surprise with their sense of humor, their tenderness, their repetitive affirmation. ‘It’s what one does,’ writes Adrian Schnall. These poems are an offering of light and I’m grateful to know them.”

–Sally Keith, author of Design, River House, and Two of Everything