The Town of No & My Brother Running

This book gathers Wesley McNair's two most important collections into one handsome volume. In "The Town of No," McNair blends sadness and comedy to remind us of Robert Frost's notion that poetry should make us "very sorry" or "very glad." In "My Brother Running," fifteen short poems on rural life are counterbalanced by the extended title piece, a memorial to a brother dead too soon and for reasons that can never be reconciled.

"He has a gorgeous ear for the rubbing-together of adjacent words. . . McNair is a New England poet, preserving the speech and character of a region intimately known. Because he is a true poet, his New England is unlimited. Whole lives fill small lines, real to this poet and real to us."
—Donald Hall, Harvard Book Review

"McNair is one of the only handful of younger poets willing to take risks. This is, without a doubt, one of the year's best poetry collections." —ALA Booklist, on "The Town of No"

"The story of the speaker and his brother takes on a degree of obsessiveness that is more urgent than anything in McNair's snapshots from rural life, and the poem is without question his best." —David Wojahn, Poetry, on "My Brother Running" "He is a much loved Maine poet grounded in small town rural life. He has a distinguished career in Maine and nationally, his poems are accessible to a wide demographic and he is one of the great storytellers in contemporary poetry." —Donna McNeil, Director of the Maine Arts Commission