David David R. Godine, Publisher
Softcover (with flaps)
Pages: 156
Size: 5.5" x 8.5"
Published: March 2010
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Lovers of the Lost brings together some of Wesley McNair’s best poetry from his six previous volumes, as well as a gathering of his newest work.

McNair has selected a wide range of narratives, lyrics, and meditations, poems in which he recounts the struggles and small triumphs of his own life and the lives of others—misfits, dreamers, sufferers and loners—seeking insights into New England, America, and the more obscure geography of the human heart. Drawn from life, McNair’s poems find their truths in the small, often overlooked events of our common existence.

Lovers of the Lost explores personal experience and the experience of others with curiosity, humor, and deep feeling, which ranges from sorrow to joy.

Critical Praise

“McNair’s poetry never condescends to its subjects; neither does it flatter its imagined readers or dare them to follow him into some abstruse modernist maze. [. . .] Some of McNair’s best poems remind me of the mid-career work of James Wright, conjuring epiphanies in the scarred, hardscrabble mill towns of the Midwest. But where Wright’s empathic imagination seems removed and isolated, in a kind of ghostly alienation from its marginal, working-class subjects, McNair’s poems feel more grounded, written in the voice of an insider.”
—Kevin T. O'Connor, Harvard Review