Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years

by Peter Grandbois

Poetry. Winner of the 2020 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, Selected by Indran Amirthanayagam. Peter Grandbois' LAST NIGHT I AGED A HUNDRED YEARS takes us on a winged journey beyond ourselves to the very lip of being, where identities blend and dissolve in their quest to 'lose the small in me.' Not content to witness and record, these talismanic verses invoke deep longing, conjuring a space where 'The spirit lives between / one name and another.' Grandbois' subtle and nuanced lines bear a silence that swells into utterance. 'We are the ones' he whispers, 'who dissolve into breath from moon to mouth...' Yet, while harkening to transcendence, these poems enact a sacrament to the sublunary, 'a meditation of mud' and 'brackish/grief' where creatures of all kinds--crows, frogs, foxes, spiders, and squirrels as well as 'hawks soaring with sun-forged feathers'--attest to the dreamlike fabric of existence. Tinctured with the wisdom of Rumi and the passion of Neruda, LAST NIGHT I AGED A HUNDRED YEARS is a book to savor--night, day, and always.--Phil Brady

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2021

About the author

Peter Grandbois is the author of sixteen books, including: The Gravedigger (2006), selected by Barnes and Noble for its “Discover Great New Writers” program, Nahoonkara, winner of the gold medal in literary fiction in Foreword magazine's Book of the Year Awards for 2011, the novel, half-burnt (finalist in the category of Multicultural Fiction in the 2019 INDIES), a collection of surreal flash fictions, Domestic Disturbances (Publisher’s Weekly pick for Best Book of 2013), as well as its companion volume of fictions, Domestic Bestiary (2023) and four novella collections or “monster double features,” Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville (honorable mention, IndieFab award for fantasy book of the year in 2014), The Girl on the Swing (Silver Medalist in the category of Best Fantasy of 2015 in the IndieFab awards), and Cat People and Dream Memories of the Fifty Foot Woman (finalist for Best Fantasy in the INDIES awards 2025), as well as the poetry collections, This House That (winner of the Brighthorse Books Poetry Prize and Honorable Mention for the INDIES award in the category of best poetry collection of 2017), The Three-Legged World (Etruscan, 2020), everything has become birds (Brighthorse, 2021), the Snyder prize-winning collection, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), and Story of a Pilgrim (Tiger Bark Press, 2026). In addition, he has published two memoirs: The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review and Kissing the Lobster (2018). His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in nearly two-hundred magazines, including Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner, and been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best American Horror. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards, have won the Best of the Neil LaBute Festival and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor for Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.

Peter is a graduate of the University of Denver (Ph.D. 2006), Bennington College (M.F.A. 2003), and the University of Colorado (M.A. 1991). Previously, he taught at California State University in Sacramento and is currently Professor of English at Denison University.

Reviews

[Ash Reads Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel weird reviewing this in full because I took this guy's class but. Yeah. 👍 Solid anthology Mr. Grandbois.