Stephen Knauth’s poems are unpretentious depictions of the poet’s life, punctuated with exhilarating flashes of transcendence: “A freight crosses the river near midnight, / dropping sparks in the mind.” —Michael Malan
Published by Cloudbank Books, Dear Dusk is the winner of the Vern Rutsala Book Prize for 2025.
More Praise for Dear Dusk
What I find satisfying about Stephen Knauth’s Dear Dusk is its humanity, gravity, invention and craft, its ability to make the important connections between the world and the self and find an accessible voice and music in doing so. One of the most resonant and representative poems in the book is “If Some Night,” which handles its emotional center without sentimentality: “What I really mean to say / when I say I love you / is that death / is not the tyrant it seems; / we are one creature, / leaping across the road at dusk.”
—Christopher Buckley, author of Sprezzatura
In Dear Dusk poems are unpretentious depictions of the poet’s life, punctuated with exhilarating flashes of transcendence: “A freight crosses the river near midnight, / dropping sparks in the mind.” Mother and Father are honored and remembered: “Approaching eighty / with a solid backstroke, her eyes closed, calmly pulling / the river downstream. He treads water, head bobbing / like an apple in a tub, Mao in the Yangtze.” Knauth’s world is a universe of magic and metaphor, the wonders of nature, and the passage of time: “days become decades,” and “I was watching / from the front room, / through the lens of another century. The speaker in Dear Dusk is at peace with life, the unexpected, and the challenges of the human experience. Readers will feel a touch of “the holy” and appreciate the humility the poet expresses in these uplifting poems.
—Michael Malan, author of Midnight at the Chevron Station
About Stephen Knauth
Stephen Knauth is the author of All Calm Beyond and five other collections of poetry. His work has been published in many journals, including Ploughshares, FIELD, North American Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Washington Square Review, The Sun, and Poetry Daily. He has twice held creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and also from the North Carolina Arts Council. He lives with his family in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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