The First 649 Days

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The First 649 Days/Eric LeMay. Kent State University Press

April 2026
254 pp., 6 x 9
Paperback, $26.95
ISBN 978-1-60635-506-0

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Essays and Other Acts of Love

Books, Forthcoming, Poetry, Wick First Book

Eric LeMay

DescriptionHow do we wrestle with unimaginable loss? How does love open us to new worlds and even new versions of ourselves? In The First 649 Days, Eric LeMay explores the everyday moments and momentous events that make and unmake our lives, from the birth of a child to mass death in a global pandemic to finding a home and comfort among the fields and forests of Appalachian Ohio.

Using forms as diverse as journal entries, cell phone texts, children’s picture books, and erasure poems, LeMay wrestles with questions of illness, isolation, identity, grief, family, and love because, like so many us, he’s had to live them. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 when his first child was a little over a year old. He learned during the worst month of the COVID-19 pandemic that his 80-year-old father, unable to breathe, had been admitted to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Would he live? And if not? In these richly varied essays, LeMay helps us make our way, personally and collectively, through experiences that may be our last, all the while honoring those “firsts”—the first cry, the first word, the first day of school.

With remarkable humor and candor, LeMay explores how we grieve, how we grow, and how the gardens we plant, the children we raise, and the words we share lead us more deeply into our own lives.

AuthorEric LeMay is a multimedia artist and writer currently in remission from cancer. He is on the faculty at Ohio University, where he directs the creative writing program. He is also a host on the New Books Network. He is the author of five books, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, the Best Food Writing series, and other venues.

Praise“Eric LeMay’s The First 649 Days is a work of breathtaking honesty and heart. LeMay captures life’s singular moments—the birth of a child, unexpected illness, mortality—exquisitely, revealing the precarious beauty of our world through the eyes of his young son Ro. LeMay’s inventive renderings are a brilliant reminder that our lives may harbor threat, disappointment, and grief, yet still shimmer with hope and wild beauty at every turn.”—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

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“The First 649 Days is worth its weight in gold, mined responsibly from the veins of Eric LeMay’s heart. In its shine you may find yours. Perhaps you’ll meet the parent you want to be or give voice to your silenced inner Hamlet. You may awaken with him at Fox Lake to the body’s vulnerability or warm with gratitude for those nurses who can gentle terror. Certainly, this private reckoning invites communion, as the birds commune over feasts of seeds he presents as poetry on paper altars. How do you want to be remembered? we ask alongside him and, for his considerations, answer wiser.”—Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round

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“How to describe a book as so profoundly human as The First 649 Days? LeMay’s archive of parenthood during a global pandemic reckons with many of life’s heavier subjects—illness and mortality, anxiety about the future, the ever-present threat of gun violence—woven into the fabric of the small moments that, taken together, comprise the whole of our lives: bringing a newborn baby home, long walks in the Appalachian wilds, conversations over spoonfuls of sherbet. The essays in The First 649 Days are a celebration of love and its resilience in the face of unthinkable circumstances and a resonant contemporary record of our time.” —Zoë Bossiere, author of Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir