CITED BY NPR AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2023

This deeply intelligent book is a work of emotional and intellectual archeology revealing the changes wrought on two cities by the not-so-invisible hand of the market. Reading it, we see a bit of what Benjamin's Angel of History must see as he is blown backwards into the future. —Rae Armantrout

Most of us will reach a certain point in our living where if we can’t figure out how and where to place our nostalgia it will completely overwhelm us. Donna Stonecipher’s masterful solution is to build reflexive spaces for our memories, for what we’ve lost or what’s been destroyed, for what’s been so altered it’s unrecognizable. She softens the blow of time and change by finding a way to tell all our stories at once, by compressing the nearly unbearable presence of our ruins into exquisitely sculpted prose passages and thinking architectures that radiate intelligence, charm, and mercuriality. This is a book I want to always be reading. —Renee Gladman

 “The ruins of nostalgia”: a spur, a goad, a refrain, an environment, a mode of critique and homage. Stonecipher offers here both a hauntology and a melancholy celebration. This is also a sly and funny book, a brilliant new chapter in her distinctive, resonant lyrico-critical project. Stonecipher is the most compelling and transformative writer of the contemporary prose poem in English. Anecdote, vignette, ekphrasis, earworm, micro-essay, satire, incantation, griefwork: all here. This book cements Stonecipher's singular status as a poetic archaeologist and chronicler of our modernity. —Maureen N. McLane

 “Donna Stonecipher is a strange, dark, deeply nuanced and undersung poet whose work I have loved for many years. These new prose poems meditate quietly on the collective and individual longing for the past, which Stonecipher calls “only a recurring dream of never arriving.” Essayistic, utterly vulnerable and sobered by recent events, Stonecipher wonders whether “looking forward was actually, depending on your standpoint in history, looking backward, or the reverse.” In disorienting times, why not make disorientation beautiful?” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

 “Donna Stonecipher is rigorous, historical and formal … she returns us – critically, ambivalently, sensuously – to the beautiful, in all its deserved distress.”—Maureen McLane, London Review of Books

 “Beautiful and arresting” —Publishers Weekly

 “Circulating in an economy yet sunk deep within the individual’s mind, its objects impossible to recover but never truly gone, nostalgia thrums with a beguiling tension. By harnessing the musicality of this tension, Stonecipher has written an immensely rich and powerful work.” —Jane Yager, Seneca Review

 “Donna Stonecipher’s latest collection, her sixth, may just be her best yet. And that’s saying something about a prose poet widely considered one of the boldest and deftest contemporary innovators of the form. Long before this collection was published, poet John Yau raved about it in Hyperallergic. Reading it now in this handsome edition from Wesleyan, it’s easy to see why. Each poem, a single prose paragraph, invites the reader into a state of attention not unlike a dream, or a hallucination, where every detail is sharp and clear enough to be real even as it dissolves right in front of you.” —Joshua Mensch, Body Literature

 “Melodious, sly and rich in essayistic wisdom, The Ruins of Nostalgia is a credit to the [prose poem] genre.” —Alexander Wells, The Berliner

 “In her new book, Donna Stonecipher addresses a more than usually complex notion of nostalgia.” —Bruce Whiteman, Hudson Review

 “The prose poems read like spells.” —Janani Ambikapathy, The Poetry Foundation website