Now in paperback, the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

so many of the best days seem minor forms of nearness
that easily fall among the dropseed: a rind, a left-behind
-from "no picnic"

In these brilliant poems from one of contemporary poetry's most intriguing, singular voices, D. A. Powell strikes out for the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, "blossom blast and dieback." Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation, and bitter heartsickness, but with Powell's deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit.