Sun in Days

by Meghan O'Rourke

Overview

Named a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review, Sun in Days is “O’Rourke’s most ravishing and brilliant collection yet” (Cathy Park Hong).

From acclaimed poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke comes a powerful collection about the frailty of the body, the longing for a child, and the philosophical questions raised when the body goes dramatically awry. These formally ambitious poems and lyric essays give voice to the experience of illness, the permanence of loss, and invigorating moments of grace. A Paterson Poetry Prize finalist, Sun in Days is unsentimental yet deeply felt, characterized by O’Rourke’s signature lyric precision and force of observation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393608762
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/19/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the collections Sun in Days, Halflife, and Once, as well as a memoir, The Long Goodbye. A former editor at The New Yorker, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate, poetry editor for the Paris Review, and is currently the editor of The Yale Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, the New Republic, and Poetry, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and other awards, she lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

07/17/2017
In a confessional and plainspoken narrative mode, O’Rourke (author of the memoir The Long Goodbye) delves into memory and “the body’s failure” in her third collection. She addresses her own chronic autoimmune disorder directly: “You were a disease without name, I was a body gone flame,/ together, we twitched, and the acupuncturist said, it looks difficult,/ stay calmish.” Other times, O’Rourke addresses her reader, talking about her illness with deadpan delivery: “Let’s put it this way: My sickness in some sense is natural to me.// So what is the natural old me I yearn for?” The collection’s centerpiece, the 73-part poem “A Note On Process,” weaves the gymnastics classes of her able-bodied past, (“velvety feel of the floor mat, the bounce of the fiberglass bars,”) with her more recent illness, during which she recalls, “I was a low pilot flame of myself.” At these different levels of physical strength, the pace of time also shifts. For someone suffering from an illness, “seconds arrive as if in delay,” yet a youthful past recalls “cool blue/ pockets of time.” While O’Rourke hones in on her illness, the poems that transcend her physical situation are the most memorable. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Meghan O’Rourke’s new Sun in Days is a marvel, a heartbreak. O’Rourke pushes her poetry to include tactics her brilliant prose has often pursued—more information, more speculation, more room to meditate."

David Baker

"Meghan O’Rourke’s Sun In Days is a lyric meditation on what happens to consciousness when the body ineluctably fails.  As a self-portrait of chronic illness, her collection compassionately celebrates the sensuality of experience and mourns its gradual and mysterious loss.  This is O’Rourke’s most ravishing and brilliant collection yet."

Cathy Park Hong

"In long lines—like long nights of love or suffering—or in fleeting scenes like snapshots, O’Rourke reminds us that life (in a body, of the mind) is a dappled thing, patchy and reverberating. The poet’s heat-seeking intelligence detects primal unanswered questions (of pain, of desire, of loss) and finds new ways to throw light on them… In the world of [Sun in Days], what was longed for (but never was) is as meaningful as what happened, as true as what is, depending on the light. O’Rourke’s light is gorgeous and powerful."

Brenda Shaughnessy

08/01/2017
Along with the collections Halflife and Once, O'Rourke has authored the highly regarded memoir The Long Goodbye, about coping with her mother's death, so it's hardly surprising that this new collection is delivered in forthright confessional style. Interestingly, the opening poem, "Self-Portrait as Myself," mourns something she never had—"the daughter I lost/ by not making her," which sets the tone for the poems of bittersweet remembrance and reflection to come. The long title poem captures the sense of time passing as it moves from a child's lazy days of summer to skaters on a Maine lake, with a mother in the background advising, "Stop worrying/ about the future, it doesn't/ belong to us and we don't belong to it." Instead, we get a sense of the steady drip-drip of events, of life "made of days and/ days, ordinary and subvocal." Throughout, O'Rourke is excellent at limning the hazy sense of loss that inevitably defines our moving forward and how we can therefore feel detached from ourselves, somehow fraudulent. "Used to know how to live," says a plaintive but tough poem, and O'Rourke gives us some guidance as she acknowledges "soon enough/ it'll be winter." VERDICT Popular poetry for all readers.

Library Journal