Selected by Louise Glück as Winner of the 2023 Changes Book Prize, Laura Newbern's second collection is a work of burning, restrained urgency that looks at loss, isolation, the passage of time--and what endures despite. Written in a town that was once home to the world's largest asylum, these poems are studies in the dual nature of that idea: asylum, always both a protection and an exile. "Poetry's impossible objectives--permanence, the dream of perfection--haunt these poems. Poems about art and the making of art recur, but in the main, A Night in the Country is rooted in a recognizable human reality, less rarefied than art but sharing with art a recognition of limitation." --Louise Glück "Laura Newbern's A Night in the Country is at once direct and mysterious, a book of declarations and decrees subsumed in the language of the fable. These poems romp and turn and wander and wonder with no easy endings in sight, or as Newbern herself might say, 'Life's a room: outside/it two great rivers meet in sunlight...there is no help in them.' These are exceptional poems, and a subtle song of heartbreak plays through every line." --Jericho Brown Laura Newbern is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Kore Press First Book Award. The recipient of a Writer's Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She lives in Georgia and teaches at Georgia College and at Reinhardt University. She currently serves as the editor of Arts & Letters.