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Following over 50 magazine publications and e-book releases, Hanging the Angels is Blake Lynch's first full-length, traditionally published poetry collection-a fierce, intimate, and often darkly funny reckoning with cancer, memory, loss, manhood, and the salvations of fatherhood and family.
Structured around the imagined body of a wooden angel, these poems form a road map through a landscape of hospitals, highways, motel rooms, and ghost towns. From the steel bones of Pittsburgh to the haunted air of New Orleans, from broken family lines to the fragile joy of raising a daughter, Hanging the Angels pulses with hard-won grace and lyric intensity. Drawing from the confessional tradition, Appalachian storytelling, and Rust Belt elegy, Lynch writes with a voice that is both mythic and deeply personal.
These are poems that confess, cuss, and break your heart in the same breath. They drive dark roads, sing survival into silence, find beauty in ash and sky, and whisper what the living do after the storm has passed. The result is an elegy rebuilt in light-an act of memory, defiance, and love.
Tributes include lost friends and mentors, a motorcycle-riding cancer survivor who never made it home, a daughter who gives the speaker reason to stay, and figures like Evelyn Grace and Andy Kaufman. Many poems originally appeared in 2River, Commonline Journal, Dunes Review, King Log, Levitate Magazine, Lines + Stars, PulpMAG, Poplorish, In the Teeth of the Wind, and Turk's Head Review.
For readers of Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Jack Gilbert, or Larry Levis, Hanging the Angels is a testament to survival, and a reminder that some voices shine brightest after the fire.
