PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Sean Hewitt's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (2020), won the Laurel Prize in 2021. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. He lives in Dublin.
Hewitt's book is excellent... It makes one hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend of men writing about love with the same intense vulnerability that women have for decades now... [Hewitt] shows himself to be one of our foremost memoirists... A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon. Let us hope it is but a first volume, the beginning of a vast work. * Sunday Times * Rapturous... even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets' memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences... Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own. -- Melissa Febos * The New York Times * [An] extraordinary memoir... All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that. * Observer * Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years... intensely original. -- Alexander Chee * The Atlantic * [P]oignant and painful, rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir... This book stands alongside Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast as an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet's journey of self-discovery. -- Michael Arditti * The Spectator *
