Awards

• Runner-up for Pulitzer Prize 2012 (United States)
• Winner of Isabella Gardner Poetry Award 2019 (United States)
• Winner of Lannan Literary Award for Poetry 2006 (United States)
• Winner of Lannan Literary Award for Poetry 2006 (United States)

Overview

Full Product Details

Author:   Bruce Weigl
Publisher:   BOA Editions, Limited
Imprint:   BOA Editions, Limited
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 0.80cm , Length: 22.80cm
ISBN:  

9781960145437

ISBN 10:   1960145436
Pages:   109
Publication Date:   10 July 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

To the Reader My Corona Landslide Loving the Jungle Blues Tender Lotus The Preponderance of the Great Splitting Apart, (Homage to Emily D.) Mưa Xuân Written the Day Mr. X Left Prison Thinking About Her Outside of Quảng Trị City, 1968 All that I Need Verse Thirteen Evening Before Desire in Hà Nội Victim of Love The First Time I Heard Your Name it was Different Autumn, End of Everything Attending a Meeting of High Officials The Dangers of Searching the Photographs of Renato Sandoval Sky Epistolary to a Brother How Odd Our Grief The New Road Neighborhood Showdown Empty A Simple Lesson Why I Love my Doctor Here I am My Bill Evans Small Autumn Festival Song for Xia Lu Loving the Thai Binh River Ghosts The Quality of Mental Health Care at the VA The Inevitability of Things Why I Flunked Philosophy 301 Being and Listening Waiting for my Father’s Bus Bodies Tôi đi bộ quanh hồ Hà Lê Weight of Rain The Ambiguity of his Intentions Apostle of Desire Homage to the Gecko Saying Goodbye to Achill A Vision Uvalde The Names of Loss in English I Went Mental For Bella, Dancing An English Novel Whoever They Were The Lake Will Take You Home Monk at Trấn Quốc Pagoda The History of the Blues in Hà Nội Hồ Gươm Romance Hàng Khay Rain Hồ Gươm Moment Our Fear of Hồ Gươm Berserk Now, Unattached Some Words for my Grandchildren Marching with the Dead on Bà Triệu A Brief Epistemology of Longing The Priority of Paradigms for Her In the Presence of Sympathetic Ghosts Dark Barges Churn the River White in the Moon Meditation at Bao Vinh Among Roses What Nhung Wrote Down Temporal Reality Take Out for A. Red Bridge on Hoan Kiem Lake Night Message, From a Friend Going Back An Ars Poetica Notes

Reviews

“Bruce Weigl’s 15th collection of poetry, Apostle of Desire, reminds me what people were feeling in 1968, blood in our streets and in the streets of Vietnam, where your brother, father, son—or you—faced deadly combat. Weigl was an 18-year old Ohio soldier who saw and participated in unshakable human damage. He became, afterward, the preeminent poet of the experience Americans have tried for decades to dodge. From the start, his poetry’s love of country, and outrage at our failed national morality, echoed Whitman and Melville; the shock and despair those giants turned into art, their pleas for the future. Apostle of Desire is Bruce Weigl’s chronicle of how one veteran has carried on a singular postwar détente, including intense and multiple returns to Vietnam and years spent engaging its culture, life, citizens, shrines, dreams, and especially poets, translating and publishing them in the US, marrying the two languages as redemption. His stories of how it felt to come home a pariah and a hero, depending on who was talking, compose a hard misery that has not yet ended, but his mature poetry becomes a celebration of Vietnam’s rivers, mists, flowers, hand-holding lovers, children, and abundant and joyful human-ness. Weigl’s poems are—make no mistake—tough, unflinching, and demanding in his quest for self-reclamation. That’s what our country trained him to be. But what most stands out in Apostle of Desire  is a kind of holiness like the songs of monks, and that barbed, witty, lonesome knowledge only deeply examined experience provides. Whitman’s. Melville’s.  I think Apostle of Desire is what poet James Wright meant when he said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown man. This complex, serious book is about American conduct. It is grown-up and splendid.”—Dave Smith

Author Information

Bruce Weigl is the author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, most recently Among Elms, in Ambush (BOA, 2021). His book,The Abundance of Nothing (Northwestern University Press, 2012) was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, and Harpers, among a wide variety of magazines and journals. Weigl lives inOberlin, OH.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions