Penryn drives through the streets of San Francisco looking for Paige. Why are the streets so empty? Where is everybody? Her search leads her into the heart of the angels' secret plans, where she catches a glimpse of their motivations, and learns the horrifying extent to which the angels are willing to go.

Meanwhile, Raffe hunts for his wings. Without them, he can't rejoin the angels, can't take his rightful place as one of their leaders. When faced with recapturing his wings or helping Penryn survive, which will he choose?

Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.

Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,� still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.�

Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.

Once caged in an illusory realm by blood relatives, Alice Marin has been freed into a world where the last remnants of magic are quickly passing away. Dissolving with them is the unity among witches…and their sanity. Grappling with the revelations of her true parentage—and her burgeoning relationship with Nathalie Boudreau, a psychic with her own demons—Alice and her allies, both living and dead, must draw on every skill they possess. It’s the only way to defeat the destructive forces borne of the horrifying history of Alice’s own family. That means unlocking the final secrets of The Book of Unwinding.

Now, on the longest night of the year, the streets of New Orleans will become a battleground as Alice and the few she can trust engage in a war amid the final days of magic. But the revelations that lie ahead may be too dark to escape.