“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection, "Afterlight." These poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, revealing the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
Caleb Nolen is winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for "Afterlight." His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Bat City Review, Fence, The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
He and his wife live in the Shenandoah Valley. In addition to writing, Caleb is a volunteer with The Catherine Project, a free community of learning, where he leads reading groups and tutorials on philosophy and literature.
