Poems that travel a geography of loss and repair, generating new grammars of vision and community. From the deserts of Arizona, to the Gowanus Canal, to the inlets of Mattituck.
The subjects are wildly various — from media, to nature and geography, to fatherhood, and to love. Some hit the lyric, some speak in glitched sentences, and some just make bad jokes.
The transit of the book leaves us looking at trees as places to secure things, and as places to hear songs of return and rebuilding.
Arizona Desert · Gowanus Canal · Mattituck Inlets
Praise
"Eric Wertheimer writes poems the way certain people think after midnight: associative, wounded, silly, and suddenly devastating. The Lay Down Yard is filled with scrapyards, highways, broken trees, earaches, eclipses, and spiritual static, all rendered in language that feels both deeply American and completely singular. These poems refuse easy wisdom, which is precisely why they linger."
— advance praise
Previous collections
2018 · BlazeVOX
Named for the brightest star in Leo — poems of magnitude, navigation, and the distances between fixed points.
2012 · BlazeVOX
Reflective surfaces, ambient signals, and the thin membrane between transmission and silence.
About
Eric Wertheimer is a professor of English at Stony Brook University. He lives on the east end of Long Island.
He is the author of Mylar (2012) and Regulus (2018), as well as scholarly monographs Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771–1876 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1872 (Stanford University Press, 2006). He co-edited Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict, and Memory in Everyday Life with Monica Casper (NYU Press, 2016). He has received fellowship and grant support from the Mellon Foundation and the Luce Foundation.
Scholarship