Sofia M. Starnes

Body of the World

Arts & Literature

“How rare a gem, Rossiter’s poetry of praise, joy, and grief unfolding in wonder, the world wrapped in grateful embrace. A world whose body means, as our bodies mean, whose mornings are ‘the flow of color into form,’ whose shadows breathe substance. And we are prompted to respond: ‘Yes . . . to senses born before language, / bird song . . . skin touching skin.’ These are beautiful poems. And true. They are the poems our heartful minds most need.”

Heart Fiat

Arts & Literature

“In a fascinating, all-encompassing tour where “the transcendental signified is situated, proper” there is no area beyond experience that is not imbued with the sacred, the miraculous. What a blessing it is to encounter a poet so immersed in God’s Word.”

Jesus Poems

Arts & Literature

“In Bill Ayres’s marvelous collection, Jesus Poems, the poet rewards our sensibilities with an Emmanuel of daily speech. We exult in God’s proximity, while we tremble before him. Either way, there is deep holiness in this quotidian yet intensely lyrical portrait of the Son of Man! ‘It is God I feel rasp against my tongue,’ we read and are compelled to read further, for we know that such closeness is bound to yield more intimacy, far more.”

Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo

Arts & Literature

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)

Say This Prayer into the Past

Arts & Literature

“When Paul Willis writes, 'the confused but steady luster of dawn, / clear skies born from gasp of night, / the breathless story,' he encapsulates the faith and beauty of his new collection. Here, we do not travel through time, as one might suppose, but hold it in abeyance, that prayer might reach each generational corner and poetry fulfill its call. And all the 'inarticulate occasions' are suddenly blessed by word.”

Searching for Nova Albion

Arts & Literature

“Early in this resonant collection, Pamela Cranston offers this wise counsel. Having described the snowy egret, she says: ‘like a seer with piercing eye / probing the heart of things. / This is how a poet should walk the earth.’ The advice is sustained by poems that pay homage to detail and by the tenderness in Cranston’s observance of faith, as she traces its imprint in walls and pathways, monuments and things, history and heart. Happy are we who, drawn to pilgrimage, would take this poet as our guide.”

The House of Metaphor

Arts & Literature

“‘Let’s hear it for history’s little people,’ Pamela Cranston writes, surely eliciting a smile from the reader. Actually, the admonition epitomizes something deeper in her work: the recovery of people otherwise ignored, their recreation through images both tender and firm. Resurrecting them, she pleads, ‘let my words be to you / like the green earth cherishing.’ Like burgeoning life for us, too, fortunate guests in The House of Metaphor she so blessedly builds.”

Trouble in the Diocese

Arts & Literature

“Here, the profusion of people and things in constant interaction makes tidiness impossible, yet the apprentice--inside us, vital, marvelously human--navigates the world into purgatorial wisdom. These poems mark the way of purification, in the knowledge that 'the whole nameless thing rides on the night.' And in the midst of the daily toss and the tumble, so cadently assembled, we are given this assurance as well: 'how does he get Jesus to take him? / Already has.' In him, with him: these are poems to make valiant the journey.”

Viriditas

Arts & Literature

“Kathleen Staudt’s Viriditas opens our eyes to a luminous world of colors, which then permeates our interior beyond our knowing. It is the ‘green of ordinary time,’ the ‘quick in the root of being,’ a vivacity we are blessed to experience, paradoxically, in moments of profound stillness. Staudt invites us into such moments, through poems of quiet love for the world in and around us—both the world and the words being God’s gift.”

We Share the World

Arts & Literature

“How best to summarize the enchantment in Bill Ayres’s poems, earthy intimations of the sublime! Not mere growth but transformation. Every poem, a surprise. Metamorphosis. Wholeness and specificity. Sharp edges and tenderness. ‘Thank you for those days / you raised me up the flagpole / so I could flap, terrified…, / and lowered me down as dusk neared, / gathering me in your arms.’ Come and read! Let these poems offer you their holy rescue.”

You Teach Me Light

Arts & Literature

“In her poem ‘What Poetry Wants’ Melaney Poli writes, ‘the surprise of butterflies blowing around you / the scalpel that removes something hard from your soul,’ thus encapsulating what her impressive debut collection achieves. In You Teach Me Light we experience a tendering at the expense of our rendering. ‘Surrender the carapace of your soul,’ her verses seem to say. And when we do, how fresh, how full, how blessed is their touch!”