The chairs have come in
and the crisp yellow thwock
of the ball being hit
says somehow, now that it's fall,
I'm a memory of myself.
My whole old life-
I mourn you sometimes
in places you would have been.
-October

The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds-the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in Wideawake Field sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.