Sean Bishop’s debut collection of poems is not, as the foreword states, for the faint of heart. These are poems of longing and loss, of wishing and wishes, of desire, and of the unequivocally true knowledge that wishes do not, and will not, come true. These poems unsettle the ground and call into question our own connections with our family and with language, as well as our religious and secular understanding of the world. Throughout The Night We’re Not Sleeping In, we have a speaker trying to be heard by an absent father, an absent god, or his fellow partners in suffering. At times, the speaker seeks forgiveness:
