D. A. Powell's fourth poetry collection Chronic was afinalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation and bitter heartsickness, but with D. A. Powell's deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit. In these brilliant poems from one of contemporary poetry's most intriguing, singular voices, Powell strikes out from the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, 'blossoms blast and dieback'.