The Complete Stories

Noah Warren

The Complete Stories announces its desire and its lie in the title; this is a book of shatter and loss. In his second collection, Noah Warren―previously selected by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets―unravels histories both personal and public, picking apart their ugliness, beauty, and irreducible singularity. Clothed in broken forms, these poems of grieving and tentative joy ask finally how we can go forward with our own mottled pasts, into the futures we can’t predict but for which we must bear responsibility.

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ISBN: 9781556596162

Format: Paperback

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Notes on the Mystery

Younger, I could go to my friend
when her heart had been pierced

and she was gasping for breath,
and I could tell her, nothing is lost

entirely, all experience
in time becomes a window.

She was twisting the wheel
of a wooden toy. I’d said more

than I believed.
Two blocks down, fine pins

of ice slurred the brackish water, slowed
the small waves, until on a last

heave, one
froze, a sheer shell

in the dark between the reeds.
When I search

my journals for her,
who melted from my life,

I’m searching for you, and for this
special faithlessness, I apologize;

there are so few people
in those soft covers, so many

descriptions of our four rooms—how they remain
the same, tall and old, quietly beautiful,

and yet change utterly as the sunlight
fills and abandons them on a clear afternoon.

Today was cooler. A high film of cloud
calmed me; a letter and an offer came.

Though I was tired, I brushed varnish on the floors,
let it thicken, then buffed it until it glowed

with cloths cut from a green flannel shirt
my father sometimes wore.

About the Author

Noah Warren is the author of The Complete Stories (2021) and The Destroyer in the Glass (2016), chosen by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is pursuing a PhD in English at UC Berkeley. He lives in Oakland. His poems appear in The Paris Review, Poetry, ZYZZYVA, PEN America, New England Review, Narrative, The Southern Review, AGNI, Poets.org, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere.

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Reviews

“The Complete Stories by Noah Warren examines public and private history while offering a path forward marked by responsibility and hope.”—Publishers Weekly

“Warren… investigates loss, grief, and struggling to make sense of one’s life in quietly burnished language.”—Library Journal

“These poems recognize that endings are provisional, wobbling their landings in resonant images that linger past the finish.”—Literary Matters

“In poems of striking musicality and formal dexterity, Warren reveals how public and private history is shaped by stories.”—Publishers Weekly

“A living tradition is not history, it’s not quite the past, and it’s certainly not as rigid as what is called ‘the canon.’ However that pattern of time is dramatized, these poems come to acknowledge the pleasure of leisurely, lovingly, sitting around to share dinner with people who narrate these stories for us, listeners in service to the language.”—Ploughshares

As featured in:

Library Journal, “Editors’ Spring Picks for 2021”

The Rumpus, “What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Poetry”