Marjorie Maddox

Evensong for Shadows

Arts & Literature

“In Evensong for Shadows, poet Shanna Powlus Wheeler sings what is too often left unsung. Here are the lonely notes we hum in private and the fierce refrains we bellow to the universe. Here also is a ‘Doxology with Crow,’ a ‘Fertility Lullaby,’ a ‘Descant on the 23rd Psalm,’ and praise for wind chime and water chestnut. . . . Throughout, she ‘watch[es] through rain for spring.’ Like her ‘shrill chorus of starlings,’ she ‘swarm[s] skyward . . . back to the mouth of God.’ She takes us with her!”

Gabrielle’s Horn

Arts & Literature

“David Craig’s Gabrielle’s Horn—an inspiring response to Gabrielle Bossis’s He and I—powerfully moves between the everyday and the eternal. In profound and humbling meditations on life and mortality, the poet enters deeply into the French mystic’s inner conversations with Christ. ‘We always start with nothing. And that’s just the beginning,’ he reflects, expertly guiding us toward that greatest of intimacies: prayer. Tender, honest, and bold, these contemporary orisons lift us, support us, and ultimately transport us to the company of the Divine, where ‘Contemplation is a bird with golden hands,’ where ‘Grace is delivered to us in a kind of sign language.’ This is a collection for the bedside table. Keep it close; return to it often!”

Hawk and Songbird

Arts & Literature

“A book of flight, dive, trill, and shriek, Susan Cowger’s bold and riveting collection on cancer, Hawk and Songbird, takes away our breath and then infuses us with Spirit. These luminous poems brim with birds and tremble with omnipresent Coyote. Yet, in the midst of ‘animal pain,’ the poet also howls love of family, friends, and the Divine. Even in ‘darkness / darker than the darkness / of before,’ Cowger’s necessary words rise and soar.”

Heart Fiat

Arts & Literature

“In the opening poem of Heart Fiat, Desmond Kon explains, “I was taught the virtue of exacting strain / from the particular, / an exactitude of language… Till meaning broke.” What follows are rituals of defining and trying to define, of variation within repetition, as well as ancient and contemporary narratives knotted together as epistle, list, contrition, and lament. In lyrical, experimental, and prose poems, Kon keeps unfolding meaning into a call-and-response with philosophers, theologians, poets, and saints. In these fast-moving poems—where brackets underscore thought within thought—Kon presents “no illusion / but a mirror / of what faith can become.”

House of 49 Doors

Fiction

“An often haunting but ultimately hopeful story-in-verse, Laurie Klein’s powerful House of 49 Doors explores the sacrifices we willingly or unwillingly make for others. This is a book that needs to be read, especially by those who have been trained to keep secret what pains them most. Come. Her hand is steady. Take hold.”

I Call to You from Time

Arts & Literature

“I Call to You from Time is a lyrical collection of free verse and accomplished fixed forms—not of saintly supplications, but of prayer as ‘a there / [we] often cannot enter.’ But it also is a book of unexpected annunciations and epiphanies.”

Mining the Bright Birds

Arts & Literature

“‘Like holiness / with wings,’ Jody Collins’s new collection, Mining the Bright Birds, sings a life of prayer, writing, gardening, family, and birds of every hue. Wise, poetic meditations assure us that we too are made for hope, ‘for here and hear.’ Collins encourages us to wait patiently and ‘rest on beauty.’ In this way, like the poet, may we continue ‘past empty, quiet gray / searching for a hummingbird / in the snow,’ rediscovering home in the Creator.”

Slender Warble

Arts & Literature

“A rich chorus of paradox, Susan Cowger’s Slender Warble harmonizes the weather of fear, faith, and flight. By bee, hawk, gull, and the wide wings of the Spirit; by the alarm of accident, groan of grief, ‘caesura / between worlds,’ or full-throated song of glory, we soar on these poems, hover, plummet, rise to soar again.”

Trespassing on the Mount of Olives

Arts & Literature

“In Trespassing on the Mount of Olives, Davis explains, ‘They are the story’s unnamed / who move me . . . since without / them . . . there is no story.’ Through persona poems and first-person narratives, the contemporary and biblical intersect with insight and humor. . . . What follows are spiritual and social examinations: ‘How to clear out a self from a self,’ how to protect the environment, how to face doubt and mortality, and, ultimately, how to ‘do whatever he tells you,’ even if that means, according to Davis, writing poems. Thank God for the latter.”

Trouble in the Diocese

Arts & Literature

“As French film director Francois Truffaut mused, 'When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic . . . it's just wonderful'--as is David Craig's newest book, Trouble in the Diocese.”