Sally Thomas

Ancient Salt

Arts & Literature

“In these lucid and penetrating essays, Frisardi brings an intense intellectual sympathy to bear on the poet’s attempt to reintegrate, in the act of poetic making, his or her sense of a fragmented cosmos, including the hidden cosmos of the self. . . . Frisardi’s careful close readings re-narrate each poet’s imaginative pilgrimage toward a larger apprehension of belonging, coherence, and unity, that punctum where ‘eternity flows into time.’”

Home Songs

Arts & Literature

“From the large ecstasy of the Song of Songs, to the ‘patient,’ piety-seeking women of the Bible and classical literature, to the world of the present in which marriage is “’a ceremony of great joy and doom,’ the poems in Sarah Reardon’s Home Songs, with their careful attention to formal craft, acknowledge a world full of alienation and grief, yet lit with grace—an earthly homeland in which all humanity dwells in exile.”

Ponds

Arts & Literature

“Billboards in Times Square converse with medieval illuminated manuscripts. A mother observes her child’s incomprehension of patterns—movements of sun and moon, a father’s departure for and return from work—as she stands outside the ongoing now he inhabits. The archangel Gabriel steps out of the timeless universe to kneel, in a single time and place, before a woman whose finite body will contain the infinite. With a formal restraint that tempers their heartfelt impulses, a historicity that holds the past in tension with the present they probe, Jane Scharl’s poems engage with time and point to eternity.”

Quarter Blend Polly

Arts & Literature

“Daniel Fitzpatrick’s poems hold a teeming world, thick with detail. They signal their urgency in the relentless coming-around of couplet rhymes, in terse dimeter and trimeter, and in painterly renderings of visionary artists and saints, ‘eyes in skulls of white flame.’ The universe these poems invoke shimmers with stark particularities, but also with mystery, terrible and beautiful. This is a universe meant for eternity but always, inexorably, ‘flowing . . . into time.’”

Sunk in Your Shipwreck

Arts & Literature

“Jacob Riyeff’s incarnational poems savor the created world, in its scents, sounds, flavors. The very air in them smells of tea . . . Over and over, they pose the integrated paradoxes of time and eternity, body and soul, human and divine, life and death, all of which find their great expression in the Person of Christ: ‘A god, and can he die?/A dead man—can he live?’”

The Stag with Crystal Horns and Other Tales

Fiction

“Drawing on the fairy-tale tradition that includes Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and George Macdonald, Grace Fitzpatrick’s The Stag with the Crystal Horns envisions a world of wonder, enchantment, discouragement, and danger. Her characters discover the uses of magic — a golden worm that brings good fortune, bubbles blown through a reed dipped into a scallop shell, a transformative bottle of “secret beer” — but more than that, they discover the possibility and peril of their own fallen human condition. Told with tenderness and down-to-earth wit, these tales will delight a new generation of children.”

To Heaven's Rim

Arts & Literature

“‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations,’ Christ exhorts his disciples. This impressive anthology affirms what we should already know: that like the word of God itself, the Christian poetic tradition speaks to, and from, all the world, in all its tongues. Collecting poems from the early church forward, drawing on the best poets and translators working today, Burl Horniachek has given readers in English that tradition’s diverse beauty and vibrancy.”