At first glance, the Christian merchandise populating Jesus Merch: A Catalog of Poems (such as “Christian pumpkins,” “emoji angel necklaces,” or “personalized cross lollipops”) may seem solely humorous. In addition to delighting in this humor, Jesus Merch also sees its items as more than trivial or frivolous.
Since their inception on Planet Earth, humans have had to deal with meaningless, dulling, repetitious, man-made wastes of time (dust) and sudden, frightening changes (dragons) that create both calamities and opportunities, depending on a person’s abilities and wisdom.
From its “Cover Letter” to readers, Now in Contest invites us to listen to America’s many voices and how they are divided from each other and our history. From the many in contest, it listens for one hope to go forward into today and tomorrow. Consider the young Black veteran pulled over “One Night in America,” and the immigrant day laborers who endure stereotyping so their kids… grow straight American teeth.
The Glue Trap and Other Poems is a volume in which range should be read as trajectory, the personal and the social as reciprocal metaphors, in which my speaker’s voice aspires to the credibility of a masterful monologue and my monologues aspire to the credibility of my truest voice, spoken and formal language converging in artifice as sincerest sense, the genuine.
She Calls the Moon by Its Name, a powerful and haunting series of poems, follows a nineteenth-century farm woman in spiritual isolation as she finds strength in naming what is alive around her—or even hidden in plain sight. She seeks the names of moons, of animals, of fields and stones, of children and lost babies, and in the process, what is solid and earthborn learns to live patiently with what is not.
In the Cities of Sleep is a collection of poems centered on the ramifications of a warming world, a world where not only the climate is changing but also the social contract as regions and nations vie for resources and civil unrest gives way to wars. Elizabeth C. Herron’s poems ask that we look hard enough to see beyond what is happening to what we might do to change our current trajectory.
The speakers in these poems suggest – through the relationships they build and the natural miracles they witness – that the often unsettling, muddy act of living our lives is worthwhile. This book asks us to see the world through knowing eyes: nothing is off-limits and nothing is forgotten.
Inventive, beautiful, and deep, the poems of Time Peels All to Original White muse on subjects of perennial relevance in fresh, literary ways. -Foreword Clarion Reviews
Every Transmission is about the erosion of our mechanical relationships and the movement to natural forms. Any attempts to escape the cycle only help to complete the circuits through which we flow. There are the places we create, drive toward, and rest, and in between is a sky full of electrical storms and ground filling with water and ex-life, pushing up so much faith and wonder for us to climb around on. This book is not a linear narrative but a collection of moments in lyric that world-build, guided by inhabitable voices.
Three movements—philosophical, nostalgic, and romantic—shape this collection that paradoxically defies categories even while courting their overlapping edges. Ed Higgins’s writing reveals a bemused selfregard, the ordinariness of human experience, sacred ambiguity: remarkable observations topped off by a final thread of love poems. Ed Higgins is Professor Emeritus (English Dept.) and Writer-in-Residence at George Fox University. […]
