In the Still of the Night

By Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier)

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• “That’s how one human leaves us” ends the first poem of Dara Wier’s startling new collection, a surprisingly raw and fluid exploration of grief. Wier records her thoughts with clarity and immediacy, showing us the unraveling and reconstruction of her world and consciousness after a significant loss.

  Named a Best Poetry Book 2017 by Publishers Weekly

  **Bundle the fall 2017 titles and get 40% off**

   

• With her typical subtle and eloquent emotionality, Wier offers up harmonious meditations on disquieting themes. . . . Without pedantry or obfuscation, Wier’s lines cohere into a philosophical discourse about the poet’s relationship with the world.
  Publishers Weekly, starred review

  Wier's book of poems defy convention in ways that are surprising... she seems to privilege the musicality of language above a poem's content throughout the book, and in these moments, the senselessness (and speechlessness) of loss is finally voiced.
  Lani Yu, Gulf Coast

  The book that made the biggest impact on me this year was Dara Wier's In the Still of the Night. The poems in this book are powerfully grief-stricken, yet they convey such a sense of the expansive possibilities of the imagination and poetry, that the grief becomes a source of inspiration. The austerity never tips into piousness and is in fact sometimes offset by a life-affirming goofiness. In these profoundly retrograde times, it is deeply gratifying to see poetry not as a cudgel but a light.
  Dean Young, Minnesota Public Radio

• Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier) is the author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022). Other titles include In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2014), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001).  She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council have generously supported her work. Limited editions include (X in Fix)(2003) from Rain Taxi’s brainstorm series), Thru (2019) and Two Poems (2021) from Scram, and forthcoming in 2022,  Nine Poems from Incessant Pipe. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke, published by Waiting for Godot Books. Poems can be found in Granta, Volt, Conduit,, Incessant Pipe, Biscuit Hill, blush, can we have our ball back, Itinerant, American Poetry Review, Octopus, Gulf Coast, and The Nation. She’s been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.  She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.