Close Red Water

“It’s fitting that the first phrase in the first poem of this superb first book is ‘The place I know . . . ’ Close Red Water is so authentically and so movingly focused on a single and loved locale that even the occasional poem that begins elsewhere almost always finds its way back to Virginia. And yet, there is always in this collection the sad recognition that one cannot return, not really. Aylor’s poems, to their great credit, are attuned to what can’t be fathomed without sustained and unwavering attention. What a rarity—and what a delight—in our fractured and unfocused age.” —Davis McCombs

Winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize, selected by Tina Chang, and available from Barrow Street Press!

You can request Close Red Water from your local bookstore, contact me directly for a signed copy, or order it from Barrow Street here.

Cover art: Back Fifty, a tintype made in Rockbridge County, Virginia, by the amazing Em White.

Praise and Press for Close Red Water

“An intense and haunting debut, Emma Aylor’s Close Red Water is an otherworldly calling, rich with detail, aching with a past that makes its way home to a field, a house, a room, daring to edge ever closer to the present. These poems are deftly crafted, drawing on the intimacies of landscape and nature, not as backdrop, but as characters—crows, ravens, honeycombs, ‘salt-bleached and -broken trees’—who interact with close kin, both here and departed. This is an astonishing collection where the ghosts of memory and forgetfulness live most brightly and alive here.” —Tina Chang, contest judge

“In spell-like electrics of language, these poems conjure their own hauntings in their harrowing devotions to the emblematic minutia of a place and its people. Equal parts attention as an act of prayer and tough-minded honesty, Aylor’s poems trouble affection for the hard-bitten world they create. With a unique ear for communal utterance, Aylor writes phrases that could be adages, adages that could be spontaneous speech. Signaling wonders to come from a singular poetic presence, this book is a rare and breathtaking debut.” —Pimone Triplett

“The prize-winning collection deftly blends folk and ancestral wisdom with feminist spirituality, resulting in poems that engage with landscape, family legacy, and femininity in profound ways. … Close Red Water attempts to make sense of the haunting that is familial legacy and parse out what it means to become an individual surrounded by family ghosts.” —Tyler Truman Julian, review on The Shore, Nov. 2024

Included in a roundup of new books by New England Review authors, Nov. 2023