The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose "songs of experience hum
with immediacy" (The New York Times)
Beginning with a poem called "Confessional" and ending with a poem
titled "Saint Augustine," Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates
the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first
the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions,
his propensity to destroy others and himself. "Begin by descending, "
Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating
parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed
memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity,
jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all
that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.