International Gold Winner of the Readers’ Choice Book Awards (What Light Was), Shawn Callaway Hays delivers unRegain’ wedlock is how Paradise stays Lost. What happens after Eden—after the vows, after the sacrament sours, after the sacred turns feral? In this incandescent epic of love and exile, betrayal and revelation, Shawn Callaway Hays delivers a modern-day scripture smoldering with the voices of the fallen, the unrepentant, and the still-devoted. unRegain’ wedlock is how Paradise stays Lost is a twelve-book poem of mythic grief and lyric grandeur, echoing with the ghosts of Virgil, Milton, Wilde, Gatsby, and Genesis—but unmistakably speaking in the fierce, wounded voice of our age. Told from the vantage of a husband-turned-exile, lover-turned-lamenter, the poem begins with a sacred a man stooping to his intoxicating Eve, offering her not just love but the fire of his crowned heart. Together they fall—willingly, defiantly—from a stained-glass paradise into a world of flesh, labor, and consequence. They till their new Babel floor, raise sons who reenact Cain’s jealous rage, and watch Eden slip from memory into myth. But the story fractures. She leaves. Not with a scream, but with slow, poisonous silence. Selene rising mad, a moon-goddess sewing her gamete oats elsewhere. The speaker spirals—through theology and noir, jazz and scripture, searing memory and backsliding pagan revelry. He sees himself in Gatsby pining for a green light, in Wilde bleeding from the cell of love’s undoing, in Hamlet without a ghost to obey and no Ophelia left to mourn. He becomes Javert at the parapet, Saint Sebastian under careless arrows, Prospero breaking his own staff in the storm of fatherhood and forgiveness. This is an epic not of triumph, but of burning clarity. Through the luminous wreckage of love gone apocalyptic, Hays examines the very bones of marriage, parenthood, masculinity, sacrifice, and resurrection. His verse does not flinch. It confesses the violence we do to the ones we love most—the sacred things we destroy in the name of devotion. And yet it does not leave us in ash. With a final invocation of divine epiphany—the only one there ever is—the poem brings forth a cosmic that amid the darkness, even this mortal, maddening, failing life is beloved. “God was in the cat that saved me.” unRegain’d is a rare a modern epic that risks everything. It invokes Genesis and Gatsby, Scripture and stardust, with stinging beauty and heartbreaking intimacy. It is confessional. Cosmological. Unflinching. Unholy. True. If you’ve ever loved with everything and lost anyway—if you’ve stood before a broken altar, a fading body, a silent moon—this poem is for you. “Older than our silver candlesticks… I love you, I love you, I love You.”