Nick Flynn

In this first play from the award-winning memoirist and poet Nick Flynn, four strangers meet during a blackout on a New York City sidewalk. Gideon finds himself locked out of his apartment, stranded on the street with nothing but a television and the company of three individuals, each mysterious in their own the specter-like Alice, ringleader of the neighborhood; Esra, a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother is MIA―again; and Ivan, a stranded businessman trying to make his way home. As Gideon makes futile attempts to break into an apartment that may or may not be his, an unsettling connection between Ivan and Esra develops while Alice and Gideon look on helplessly. Unable to make sense of their predicament, let alone alter it, the four float aimlessly in and out of seeming reality only to find themselves more lost when the electricity finally comes back on. Once again exploring the tenuous membrane that separates comfortable, everyday existence from the desperate margins of society, Flynn portrays an urban dystopia disturbingly similar to our own world while poignantly tapping into the loneliness and peril of city life.

Nick Flynn met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other. .

A daring and intimate new book by the poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, "a champion of contemporary American poetry" ( Newpages ) . . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it will come to me, if I can just get him to draw me a map, if I can find the tree, if I can find the shovel. And the house, the mansion he grew up in, soon a lawyer will pass a key across a walnut desk, but even this lawyer will not be able to tell me where this mansion is. ―from "Kafka" In My Feelings , Nick Flynn makes no claims on anyone else's. These poems inhabit a continually shifting sense of selfhood, in the attempt to contain quicksilver realms of emotional energy―from grief and panic to gratitude and understanding.

Nick Flynn conoció a su padre cuando ya tenía veintisiete años y trabajaba en un albergue para indigentes en Boston. Jonathan Flynn, un aspirante a escritor, se había marchado de casa cuando su hijo tenía seis meses. Cuando Nick ya era un adolescente recibió algunas cartas desde la cárcel, donde su padre estaba condenado por estafa, en las que decía que la experiencia le serviría para ser el Dostoievski de su generación, o el nuevo Solzhenitzyn, el nuevo cronista de las prisiones, el autor de las contemporáneas memorias del subsuelo. Nick, entretanto, comienza su propio viaje por la literatura, la desesperación, el alcohol y las drogas y trabaja para un antiguo novio de su madre, un veterano del Vietnam que, junto con otros pequeños mafiosos del lugar, ha creado una considerable organización para el tráfico de drogas y, posiblemente, blanqueo de dinero. Tiempo después, su madre se suicida (...) Y Nick quiere salvarse. Y escribir sus propios libros...

Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation AwardWinner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry Some Ether is one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."

New poetry by the acclaimed writer Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb electrocution, no―the boy stood in the hot-hot room stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did I did. ―from "Fire" The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is Nick Flynn's first new poetry collection in nearly a decade. What begins as a meditation on love and the body soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports, childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only to reassemble with a gathering sonic force. It's as if all the noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open, singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump cut, lyric persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient response to some of the essential issues of our day by one of America's riskiest and most innovative writers.

Now in paperback, the latest poetry by Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands begins as a meditation on love and the body but soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports, childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only to reassemble with a gathering sonic force. It’s as if all the noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open, singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump cut, lyric persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient response to some of the essential issues of our day by Nick Flynn, one of America’s riskiest and most innovative writers. “An unflinching attempt to use poetry to grapple with some of the most shameful monsters of this new century—the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and the terrible cost war enacts on everyone caught up in it, both civilians and soldiers.” —The Rumpus

For Nick Flynn, that game we all play—the who-would-play-you-in-the-movie-of-your-life game—has been answered. The Reenactments is the story of adapting Flynn's memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, into a film called Being Flynn. It is also a searing meditation on consciousness, representation, and grief. Flynn describes the surreal experience of being on set during the reenactments of the central events of his life: his father s long run of homelessness and the suicide of his mother. He tells the story of Robert De Niro's first meeting with his father in Boston and of watching Julianne Moore attempt to throw herself into the sea. Expanding on the themes raised by these reenactments, Flynn weaves in meditations on the enigmatic Glass Flowers exhibition at Harvard University, alongside Ramachandran's experiments with sufferers of phantom limb syndrome, to create a compelling argument about the eternal nature of grief.