Books
Again
Unbound Edition Press – 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9906141-8-5
From the publisher: “In Again, Charles Douthat charts a profound journey through love, loss, and the complicated grace of survival. Moving from childhood's luminous moments to the raw territories of grief, these elegies for his parents and sister transform personal sorrow into a larger meditation on how family shapes and haunts us: “They were gone for good. They light my way.” With remarkable tenderness, Douthat explores the ways we carry those we've lost, finding in memory not just pain but also unexpected mercy. From California beach towns to New England woodlands, these poems remind us that even our deepest wounds can open into moments of startling beauty and revelation.”
Praise for Again
“In an elegantly unadorned and lyrical plain style, Douthat recreates the lost and troubled members of his childhood family so vividly that we feel not so much the presence of the past as the heart-wrenching pastness of the past, in all its unresolved and unresolvable complexity. This is a book impossible not to love.”
— Alan Shapiro, author of Night of the Republic
“In these poems, you’ll find yourself in rooms so vivid you can touch their brass door-keys and feel the light on your own face.”
— Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable
“Douthat writes of living and dying, poem by poem, recalling the troubled (sometimes addicted) lives of a family, reaching in his final section a profound opening-out both of style and vista where—in memory and poetry’s paradox—there is ‘so much life afterwards.’”
— David Baker, author of Swift, New and Selected Poems
“This is the book of poetry one prays for, rarely gets.”
— Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely, author of Letter from Italy, 1944
Blue For Oceans
Winner of the 2011 PEN New England Award as the best book of poetry published that year by a New England poet.
NHR BOOKS - 2011 - ISBN: 978-0-98299008-1-9
From the publisher: “Set within an American family in the second half of the twentieth century, the poems move from California to New England, from boyhood to ailing parents, from a long marriage to love’s dissolutions, from childbirth to children leaving home. Understated, perceptive, grounded in the occasions of ordinary life, these remarkable poems by a writer looking back from midlife feel like long-promised gifts, long-waited for.”
Praise for Blue for Oceans
“Charles Douthat writes movingly of "the days whispered through us"--what time takes and leaves. His poems take to heart the precious discoveries we are allowed. Blue for Oceans is a haunted and wise book.”
— J.D. McClatchy
“Charles Douthat’s Blue for Oceans shapes and reclaims emotion as a poetic virtue at a time of post-Modernist detachment and allows us to see the world--not as we ordinarily see it--but as we experience it: through the lens of memory and the human heart. The quality of Douthat’s poems lies in their restraint, their lived-in lived-through undeniable authority. He knows that the power of the unsaid-- the vast reservoir of emotion that builds up over a lifetime of experience-- puts enormous pressure on every word. Most people try to write something called "poetry." Charles Douthat is just writing it.”
— Kurt Brown, PEN New England Award Citation
“These are beautiful, deft, honest, utterly adult poems. . . with an emotional force reminiscent of Snodgrass's Heart's Needle.”
— Baron Wormser