Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

A Crown for Ted and Sylvia

Arts & Literature

“‘You never know the truth, but try to guess.’ And guess Kim Bridgford does in these moving poems chronicling the life and death of Sylvia Plath. A Crown for Ted and Sylvia simultaneously explores and expands the mythos of the Hughes-Plath saga, conjuring the dead and giving them voices, allowing them to speak for themselves and tell their heartbreaking tale. Formally elegant, classically severe, Bridgford’s poems move by suggestion and indirection, implying much more than can be said, not just about these lost souls but about our own lives. There is a sibylline quality to this book. The repeating forms the poet favors—haunting villanelles, playful pentinas, and, of course, the regal crown—function like charms, strange enchantments hinting at mysteries that cannot be unraveled. It’s a fact: ‘You never know the truth, but try to guess.’ These splendid poems bring us closer to that knowing.”

Anno Domini

Arts & Literature

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)

Longing for an Absent God

Arts & Literature

“In Longing for An Absent God, Nick Ripatrazone demonstrates the impressive range of writers whose imaginations have been shaped by a Catholic formation. This book is a welcome and necessary addition to the unfolding account of the central role the Catholic imagination has played in contemporary American art and culture.”

Ordinary Time

Arts & Literature

“The poems in Ordinary Time, like the faith tradition the book engages, are full of grace and wisdom. Riley's collection accompanies us on our march of mortality through the liturgical year, stopping at the stations along the way. Yet this is no easy celebration of faith. In the tradition of John of the Cross, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and other deeply Catholic poets who wrestle with belief, Riley isn't afraid to engage his own dark days and nights--a darkness shared by saints and sinners alike.”

Pattern Evidence

Arts & Literature

“In this fitting final collection, Michael D. Riley leaves behind poems that bear witness to the world in all its grit and glory, as he gathers evidence attesting to both our fragility and our fortitude in the face of mystery. At the center of this mystery is the abiding beauty that inheres in all. ‘What is beauty but hope in love with everything it finds?’”

Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo

Arts & Literature

“Maryanne Hannan’s debut collection is a book of contemporary poems and prayers that resurrects worn out religious language and breathes new life into it. . . . The theme of the volume woven throughout is gratitude for the miraculous fact of creation as the poet invents a book of Psalms for our present moment, charging each poem with ‘the light of [God’s] grandeur’ and laying claim to poetry as both sign of our fall and source of our salvation, ‘our very own grasped apple.’ To read these poems is to pray them and to assent to Hannan’s generous doxology: ‘Holy, what’s lost / Holy, what’s found / Holy, the Whole.’”

The Shapes Are Real

Arts & Literature

“Jill Peláez Baumgaertner’s poems in The Shapes Are Real are moving meditations inspired by the work of Romanian sculptor Liviu Mocan. Like the shapes this book celebrates, Baumgaertner’s poems present themselves almost as three-dimensional objects, intricately-made linguistic engines that generate energy implicit in the art the poet beholds. Images of ladders, pillars, and crosses abound, moving the earthbound reader’s gaze upward towards the infinite and the (im)possible: ‘We stand in earth, in dust, / and reach for shapes / we see through mist.’ The vertical thrust of Baumgaertner’s powerful lyrics reminds us that words, like the Word himself, serve as both means of conveyance and destination, and constitute a kind of parousia. The fortunate reader realizes, to paraphrase the words of Emily Dickinson, surely one of the tutelary spirits of this volume, ‘instead of getting to heaven, at last--/ we’re going, all along.’”

What Cannot Be Fixed

Arts & Literature

“Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner's new collection of poems is a meditation on imperfection, a catalogue of flawed objects and broken beings, each fundamentally irreparable and deeply adored. The scope of this book is broad and bold, retelling the grand tale of the creation, the fall, and the redemption in terms that are contemporary, theologically imaginative, and poignantly human.”