Sun in Days
Poems
19 March 2019
Description
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.
Reviews
"Sun in Days takes up illness, motherhood and death in lyrics with an essayistic sense of exploration and self-adjustment." — New York Times Book Review
"Sun in Days reminds me that beauty and loss are inextricable—and random, in a way that’s both shattering and strangely relieving." — Atlantic
"Sun in Days is a marvel, a heartbreak." — David Baker
"[A] lasting book.… The mind of the poems is so unexpectedly precise that it illuminates a signal range of human feeling with its compassionate questioning." — Forrest Gander, Library of America
"Sun in Days is a beautiful collection by one of our best poets, a book that will help us rethink both grief and illness and how we treat those who are dealing with either. At its core, though, it’s also a book about the imagination’s resilience and a reckoning of its limitations and its needs, needs it receives from the world." — The Rumpus
"In a confessional and plainspoken narrative mode, O’Rourke delves into memory and ‘the body’s failure.’" — Publishers Weekly
"O’Rourke is excellent at limning the hazy sense of loss that inevitably defines our moving forward." — Library Journal
"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
Also By: Meghan O'Rourke 
Once: Poems
Paperback, 2013
“The poems in Once illuminate and echo themes of loss and grief.”—Vanity Fair
Halflife: Poems
Paperback, 2008
"Magnificent." —New York Times Book Review
