Older Now

About the Book

Older Now: Poems is a collection of LELjr’s most recent poetry. As with his first collection, Out of My Mind: Poems, the new book reflects on parenthood, romantic love, aging, memory, and mortality in their various expressions—contemplation, introspection, insight, and emotion—as he has grown older. The poems are more inward-looking than the earlier ones. “I am everyone I have ever been,” he says. Yet as he writes in the title poem, he says “I find myself in a narrowing space between memory and mortality, and I am not at all sure which way to look” as he explores T. S. Eliot’s “overwhelming question”: Has it all been worth it? He hopes these poems evoked similar types of reflection by readers who are, will someday be, or know someone who is “older now.”

About the Author

Following a distinguished teaching and research career in the professional field of public policy and management, LELjr assembled and published his first poetry collection, “Out of My Mind: Poems” in 2016. The following year, he published, under his given name Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., “An Iberian Trilogy and Other Stories”, a collection of his short fiction. “Older Now: Poems,” are his most recent poetic works. During his academic career at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas at Austin, the author published over fifteen single- or co-authored books and was widely published in academic journals in his professional field. He is the Sydney Stein, Jr. Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, artist prlynn, and has five children, nine grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.