If a book can be a song, the pages of Gone the Sun sing. They sing remembering and forgetting. Grief and Endurance. Present and past. In the present time of the is memoir-in-fragments, Joel Peckham spends a last summer as music director at Manitou, the boys camp that has been part of his life since he was a child. Manitou summons Peckham’s past—his father, his lost wife, his lost son. But there are songs of redemption those weeks too. This is a book that sings both back and forward with love, urging us all home.

Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Voice Lessons and Wanting Radiance

In Gone the Sun, Peckham writes about his loving, sometimes fraught history with Manitou, a summer camp he and his father worked at for many years. As his father declines into dementia the middle-aged Peckham—still working summers at the camp between semesters as a college professor—muses upon time, upon loss, and the various selves we inhabit as we age. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, but heartbreaking in the most resonant, emotionally intelligent, and illuminating way possible.

Sue William Silverman, author, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul

Joel Peckham's writing is essential reading for me. He's a contemporary whose work I need to read to understand the world I live in. His first collection, Resisting Elegy, hit me as a revelation because of its intimacy, its depth, and its unflinching honesty—not only with the reader, but with himself. There are very few people in the world willing to take such a terrifying journey into the essence of their own lives and far, far fewer with the skills to take us along with them. Peckham is one of those people and his voice guides us through a darkness we'd be too afraid to explore alone. And then there is the writing. Peckham's exquisite language does what writing is supposed to do—envelope you in a new universe and take you on a dramatic and emotional journey. His new collection, Body Memory, continues what is now his hallmark: It explores the deeply personal and hard-to- articulate understandings of what it means to both have a body and also be one. His fears, his phobias, his frailties are all on display so we can better understand ourselves and what it means to be alive—and to be grateful to be alive—today.

Derek B. Miller, author of How to Find Your Way in the Dark and Norwegian by Night