With clarity, craft, and quiet power, Gregory LeStage’s new collection stands firm in the lineage of American poetry that confronts memory, loss, and manhood without flinching.

In I Was a Shipwreck Scholar, LeStage writes with the assured voice of someone who knows the terrain—of fathers and sons, of New England coastlines, of things hard-won and harder to hold.

When not writing, LeStage devotes himself to hands-on restoration projects—rescuing an 1810 Cape Cod barn from demolition, rebuilding the cab of a 1949 Chevy farm truck by hand, coaxing a 1962 Vietnam-era Dodge M37 back to life, or or keeping a 1940 Farmall tractor running. His love for old tools, enduring things, and work done slowly by hand informs both his writing and his way of being.