Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years    (June 2021)


By Peter Grandbois

ISBN: 978-0-912592-93-0

Keywords:
winner of 2020 snyder prize chosen by indran amirthanayagam 

Available at: Amazon | Small Press Distribution

About the Author:

Peter Grandbois is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Everything Has Become Birds (Brighthorse 2021). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.

 


Praise for Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years

Peter Grandbois’ Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years takes us on a wingéd journey beyond ourselves to the very lip of being, where identities blend and dissolve in their quest to “lose the small in me.” Not content to witness and record, these talismanic verses invoke deep longing, conjuring a space where “The spirit lives between/one name and another.” Grandbois’ subtle and nuanced lines bear a silence that swells into utterance. “We are the ones” he whispers, “who dissolve     into breath    from moon to mouth…” Yet, while harkening to transcendence, these poems enact a sacrament to the sublunary, “a meditation of mud” and “brackish/grief” where creatures of all kinds—crows, frogs, foxes, spiders, and squirrels as well as “hawks soaring with sun-forged feathers”—attest to the dreamlike fabric of existence. Tinctured with the wisdom of Rumi and the passion of Neruda, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years is a book to savor—night, day, and always. 

—Phil Brady, author of The Elsewhere: New & Selected Poems

 

In Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years, Peter Grandbois embarks on an Odyssean voyage into a world of dreams, where he encounters ghosts of his past selves and searches for moments of numinous clarity just beyond the reach of language. These taut and haunting lyrics are marked by an intense yearning for what can never be regained in the waking world of loss and regret, where one can only ask questions without answers and stop one’s ears against “the buzz and clamor of growing old.” Heraclitus noted that in “sleeping each turns aside into a world of his own.” Follow Peter Grandbois into his dream worlds. He never steps in the same dream twice. 

—Joshua McKinney, author of Small Sillion

 

Peter Grandbois’ Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years is a book of the middle of the night—the hard nights in the middle of a life, when we find ourselves lost between sleep and dream, self and other, language and silence. “This world is never fully ours,” Grandbois writes, and in these haunting poems he illuminates that lack so richly as to make it—and us—seem noble. Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years offers the strange music of those late, lonesome hours—and perhaps the first, precious glimpses of another dawn.

—Dave Lucas, former Ohio poet laureate and author of Weather

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