David R. Godine, Publisher
Softcover (with flaps)
Pages: 80
Size: 5.5" x 8.5"
Published: July 2017
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Faced with shattering loss, how do we fasten ourself to life again?

In this moving collection, Wesley McNair purses beauty in the face of darkness and weaves stories of the connections we make with others that bring hope in the midst of unfastening. There’s a Japanese war bride whose husband's untimely death leaves her with two young children far from home; a survivalist who talks to deer after his family has left him; a failed painter who ropes himself to his windswept roof to view the beauty of coastal islands.

These are poems of sorrow and humor, compassion and affirmation.

Critical Praise

"The poems in The Unfastening possess a distinctly New England strain of candor and restraint and a walloping matter-of-factness… [They] whisper at an understated tenderness, an availability to being moved."
—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

" . . . some of the most skillfully processed poetic language practiced in Maine in recent decades . . . The effects of this poetry are remarkable."
—Dana Wilde, The Waterville Morning Sentinel