In Again, Charles Douthat charts a profound journey through love, loss, and the complicated grace of survival. Moving from childhood's luminous moments to the raw territories of grief, these elegies for his parents and sister transform personal sorrow into a larger meditation on how family shapes and haunts us: "They were gone for good. They light my way." With remarkable tenderness, Douthat explores the ways we carry those we've lost, finding in memory not just pain but also unexpected mercy. From California beach towns to New England woodlands, these poems remind us that even our deepest wounds can open into moments of startling beauty and revelation.

Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator and visual artist. His first book of poems, Blue for Oceans, won the PEN New England Award. His new book, Again, chosen by Peter Campion for Unbound Edition Press, is forthcoming in 2025. Born, raised and educated in California, Charles has lived in Connecticut for many years.

"In an elegantly unadorned and lyrical plain style, Douthat recreates the lost and troubled members of his childhood family so vividly that we feel not so much the presence of the past as the heart-wrenching pastness of the past, in all its unresolved and unresolvable complexity. This is a book impossible not to love." — Alan Shapiro

"In these poems, you'll find yourself in rooms so vivid you can touch their brass door-keys and feel the light on your own face." — Tyler Mills

"Douthat writes of living and dying, poem by poem, recalling the troubled (sometimes addicted) lives of a family, reaching in his final section a profound opening-out both of style and vista where—in memory and poetry's paradox—there is 'so much life afterwards.'" — David Baker

"Each poem in this book is a sustaining spark, despite the grief and loss they overcome. . . This is a book of clarity, wrought from long life and its restraints." — Maurice Manning

"In Again, Douthat gives us poems that are morally and spiritually essential, that convey the very breath of life." — Gray Jacobik

"This is the book of poetry one prays for, rarely gets." — Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely