Set in Stone

Kevin Carey's collection Set in Stone presents poems that unfold as dreams, recollections, and rituals or ceremonies. Written for general readers, the poems take up memory, loss, and nostalgia in plain, candid language. Many trace the experience of growing up and growing older, weighing the losses and triumphs that mark a life and the traces that moments leave behind.

Carey is drawn to the puzzle of nostalgia, the haunting memories that time wears down and hardens into the threads that make up a person's life. The poems move between real and invented places and people, and they range from summer ponds and nights in bars to basketball and comic-book superheroes. Throughout, they point to what it means to be human.

The title suggests the collection's method: each poem is a stone to be worked at slowly, with the truths beneath its surface gradually coming into view.