Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering

was orphaned from the start—a prescient name, perhaps. The 2005 essay collection from renowned Portland fiction writer Charles D'Ambrosio was known to few and found by far fewer, a limited edition that was limited still further by the fact its author publicly wished the edition out of existence. But to those who found it, it was a trove of startling insight, precise language and painful emotion, cementing D'Ambrosio as one of the most talented essayists in the country. I made the mistake, years ago, of loaning away my copy—which, in the way of orphans, never came back home.

On Nov. 11, Portland's Tin House finally reissued the 11 essays—along with seven new ones—under the name

(Tin House, 368 pages, $15.95). In the title essay, one of the volume's best, an insomniac D'Ambrosio stumbles across a world of pain at 2 am in Seattle: A man is holed up in an apartment building, threatening to shoot himself or maybe others, while the rest of the tenement's residents are stuck huddled in a bus outside. He worries first about himself, of course, feels phantom rifle sights trained everywhere on his body and wants to duck for cover "until it occurs to me that the whole notion of being 'behind' anything is a logistical matter I can't quite coordinate, since I don't know where the Bad Guy is."

In other essays he does a lot more loitering near heartbreak, writing about a fundie Texas Hell House "drained of love"; the children of a Russian orphanage for whom "happiness is a big word"; convicted statutory rapist Mary Kay Letourneau's dedication to a "rule exempt, healing notion of love"; or the blinkered dreams of a biosquatter who believes that paradise is in the sky.

But while the book's subject is often disappointment and death, it remains relentlessly full of life. D'Ambrosio is a lively host to tragedy—perhaps because he is at home there, downright personable in his ease with sadness. In "Documents," he recalls a poem his father wrote about how he wanted to abandon his family; the bad rhymes embarrassed the son. He also describes his brother's suicide note, which he wrote in D'Ambrosio's bedroom before he shot himself there. With harrowing empathy and beauty—a wound that blooms like lilies—D'Ambrosio writes that he still reads the note so often "that the words ring like lines of a poem I know well."

You are likely to do much the same with this book.

WWeek 2015