Scarsdale

In Scarsdale Dan O’Brien applies to his own early life the same honesty and insight that were evident in his prize-winning War Reporter. Growing up in a family scarred by past trauma, he makes a bid for freedom―”in love with myself and this young stray’s life”―only to be pulled back into the orbit of the place he had sought to escape. Gradually, possibilities for a more lasting change unfold.

REVIEWS

“Dan O Brien has found what Frost once called ‘the sound of sense,’ has caught the language of people, stripped that language to its bare bones, rattled those bones in ways that make a wrenching but beautiful music. Moving through his American childhood into adulthood, through a wide world shattered by broken people, he finds redemption everywhere, and it’s a gift to his readers. O’Brien supplies the satisfactions of a rare imagination at work, a poet who has taken risks, exposing his deep anxieties, finding himself again and again.” 

―Jay Parini

“Dan O’Brien’s direct and sometimes stark but never simplistic poems explore the difficult complexities of boyhood, and growing up, and growing older. The painful loveliness of O’Brien’s language reveals the confusions and aspirations of the self, and the self among others, and the perilous world beyond the self.” 

―Lawrence Raab

“Dan O’Brien is one of our keenest observers of domestic life. From the grass growing greener next door, to the wildlife that haunts vacation spots, even down to the knot in a boy’s tie, this book is generously affectionate yet sharply alert to both the details and dramas in family life. Not for nothing can the word scar be found in the title Scarsdale, but as this fine poet shows, we can bear the past bravely and come away from it, as we do from his book, deeply enriched.” 

―Don Share

“Dan O’Brien’s poems are powerful and stripped down, but they expand along the mind long after they’ve been read. As in War Reporter, O’Brien captures the reflective gentleness that exists amid the damage of experience, and survives it.” 

―Patrick McGuinness 

“There are mysteries and thoughts locked deep within these poems and the questions and wounds in each will remain fresh, the complexity of emotion and narrative unfaded. Slowly, steadily, Scarsdale draws you into its world, so full of suffering and cruelty and yet a strange kind of hope and by the end even catharsis . . . O’Brien must be commended for his great bravery in releasing these poems into the world . . . Scarsdale is in essence a struggle to find the beauty and meaning of memories where beauty and meaning should not exist: this is poetry which you simply have to hear again.’

―Jeremy Gordon, The Quietus 

“Scarsdale is a masterclass in how to engage with memory and make of it something honest, an individual story yet also something universal.”

―Andrea Porter, Ink Sweat & Tears

“Wild Animals: Julianna Gray on ‘The Dead End’ by Dan O’Brien” in 32 Poems