* Winner of the Hanes Award given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers * Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Book Award * Finalist for 2016 Julie Suk Award (best poetry collection from an independent literary press) * Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship * Winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship * Winner of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship   The Halo is quasi-autobiography about a man who has wings and wants desperately to simply be human. Tracking from adolescence through adulthood, it explores an accident that temporarily paralyzes him and exposes him to human weakness all the way to his transformation into something more powerful than even he realizes. It explores a personal evolution from being prey to becoming the hunter. Praise for C. Dale Young "Young's poems are so fierce and serrated." --Jeff Gordinier, New York Times Book Review "Young is a doctor as well as a poet, and [his work] demonstrates a skilled physician's combination of empathy and formal precision." --David Orr, NPR "Sometimes the ability to convey information compactly and quickly has moral grace. [Young's] writing can put garrulous narration or evasive speechifying to shame." --Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post "[Young] questions the limits of human knowledge while expressing unwavering conviction about the strength of the human heart." -- Kenyon Review "Young's poems are so fierce and serrated." --Jeff Gordinier, New York Times Book Review "The collection showcases Young's skill with forms and repetition - the obsessions of the book are as tightly wound as clock springs onto these poems, the same kind of constraints and limits that a young man recovering from a spinal injury might feel as he watches the world from his hospital bed. The poems return to the same images, the same problems, and the same questions relentlessly, refusing to allow the reader, like the speaker, to escape the cage of the speaker's damaged body and anguished mind.... On the first reading, you'll be entranced by the stories the narrator tells about his strange disappearing wings and the recovery from his car accident. But it's Young's skill with forms and the lyric beauty of his writing even in poems describing intense pain that will make you return to this book. --Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Rumpus "Between the writing itself and the often elegiac voice, a hallucinatory dreamworld is created from the ashes of accidents and the capricious blessings of the gods. It's a very easy world to inhabit and, through The Halo 's revelations, we all learn that we're angels --fallen or about to be." --Greg Marzullo, Lambda Literary “[W]e cannot rely on art to tell us the whole truth or even depend upon those who are supposed to protect us. And yet, [C. Dale Young] is compelled to make visible the darkness around us. Whether or not that itself is an act of tenderness, Young refuses to say for certain. And that is what makes his poetry a crucible where readers must confront their own beliefs--about poetry, society, and themselves.” (Christopher Hennessy, Ploughshares) “But poetry can also demand that we not repair, that we leave torn what is torn. This is Young's great gift. He balances his desire to treat his subjects exquisitely and assiduously with his healthy skepticism about easy resolutions.” (Peter Campion, Los Angeles Review of Books) “[T]he [poems] are preoccupied with human frailty, strength, and lust; with a complex and contradictory relationship with God; and with violence in forms small and large.” (Dilruba Ahmed, Kenyon Review) C. DALE YOUNG practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A recipient of multiple fellowships, his short fiction and poems have appeared widely. He lives in San Francisco. A Man's Struggle: The Halo - A Quasi-Autobiography of a Winged Man's Desire for Humanity Life's Journey: From Adolescence to Adulthood, Exploring an Accident's Impact and Transformation Evolution of Power: From Vulnerability to Predominance