Primer on the Hereafter

Winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize

In the Primer on the Hereafter, Steve McOrmond distills the fleeting beauties and lingering pains of daily life into darkly elegant, elegaic poems. Moving from rural to urban settings, considering the stars, music, and the inanimate objects that share our lives, McOrmond subtly examines concepts of home, loneliness, belonging and worth. With graceful lines he creates startling images and metaphors, where crows are "uneless/as 10,000 cigarettes" and a young deaf couple can "hardly pay attention to what their hands are saying." This is a compelling collection—smoky and concentrated, it lingers long in the reader's mind.