I am so very thankful to W.W. Norton, Netgalley, and Nick Laird for granting me advanced digital access to this vastly immersive collection of poetry. This piece hits shelves on November 14, 2023 and I'm so gracious to have received advanced looks inside.

This book has a whole bunch of super interesting poetry. A lot of them are super short, but there is surprisingly a decent amount of information and emotion packed into even the shortest poems. I really enjoyed reading these poems.

I won't lie, most of this poetry collection felt like it went over my head. I did find the poem about his father's death really poignant, but I struggled sinking into the rest.

Vivid, striking poems. These poems move from New York to Ireland over the course of the pandemic and afterwards. The central poem about the death of the author's father is particularly stunning.

This was a very short book of poems. Since this wasn't a normal novel with a plot and characters
instead it was filled with short poems. I loved this because it gave the reader just enough information to interoperate the poems how they see them instead of having it spoon fed to them the whole time. The length of the poems was perfect because it really let the reader visualise everything without being overkill on metaphors and similes. From the title of the book I was expecting more poems about human life and interactions of people in the darkness when they are unseen by everyone else however this book was producing more poems on almost the world and nature so it was very different than I had originally thought. However even still I still managed to connect to some of these poems and see them for what they were worth. The only thing I wasn't a big fan of was I found that a lot of the poems didn't flow as nicely into the next one as some other books that I've read, however lots of them stood alone nicely. Pretty good read just not my favourite.

Up Late had a really interesting mix of poems. I liked the ones that were more nature based (there's one along a seaside that is delightful). At times there were references to the earth being underneath it all, reaffirming the damage we are doing to out planet.