Sweet Lorain

the long version

As an elegist of the lives of those who have been changed by hardship and suffering - especially by war - Bruce Weigl has become one of the most admired American poets of his generation. In this, his seventh book of poems, Weigl returns not only to Vietnam but to the Lorain, Ohio, of his youth. In his continued quest for emotional and spiritual enlightenment, Weigl writes about the connections between his childhood in a working-class world and the powerful effects of the American war in Vietnam on all of us. With his characteristic fluidity of syntax and strong metaphor, Bruce Weigl has created in Sweet Lorain a description of living one life in two vastly different worlds.