A Country of Strangers

New and Selected Poems

By: D. Nurkse

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories.

D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.

Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens.

Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.

©2022 D. Nurkse (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

One of Library Journal's Best Poetry Books of the Year

"This substantial volume gathers work from Nurske's 35-year career to make the case that he is, quietly, one of our most engaged civic poets, even as he honors interior lives and emotional complexity." —The New York Times

"Memorable. . . . Nurkse’s poems are as fresh and bizarre as ever, lingering at checkpoints, border crossings, transit areas, and 'that uncertain moment/ between false dawn and dawn.' Nurkse’s portraits . . . are skillful sketches." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"To read D. Nurkse’s A Country of Strangers is to walk the roads of never-ending war, the words illuminated by the light of whistling rockets or blown up by bombs. This collection tells the truth of war in lyrical language—how it both follows and leaps ahead even as we think we will escape it, how it lives inside us even during peace time. These poems are shrouded in darkness; they reflect both the poet’s alienation from and his love for his fellow citizens. He makes it clear that although we will never completely know each other’s truest thoughts, we may somehow find hope in these bombed-out forests of words. America is lucky that Nurkse tells such truths, bears such witness with such grace." —Big City Lit