LITMIR.BIZ

Ash & Embers embodies the inherent messiness of life's journey, sorting detritus from treasures, identifying and naming memory, finding categories that reflect life's winding pathways and its treacherous footing. Taking his various roles–son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, neighbor, teacher, citizen, believer, writer, and reader–as narrative stances, Zoller considers the details of life and its larger forces. Thematically complex, Ash & Embers accepts that the journey is translated through the often difficult tool of language; thus, it embraces the tension that language is inadequate, alien, and, paradoxically, a tool for recognition and understanding. In Zoller's poems how we speak about life–as physical passage, as spiritual pilgrimage, as imagined patterns, as emotional canvas, as interwoven narrative strands, and as social construct–all these voices meet in one conversation. Between «Photographs» that begins the book and «Hard Copy» that brings it to a close we find everything from first impressions to «Second Knowings,» from notes on the poems of Mao and Seamus Heaney to prayers to the God of time, eternity, and love.

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D.S. Martin's new poetry collection Ampersand brings together portraits & observations where the poet reflects upon artists, saints, reformers, poets, his own elderly parents, & various biblical characters–including twelve poems written for each of the twelve disciples. Ampersand–as the title suggests–brings together many disparate things, giving room for diverse reflections on human experience & the world in which we live.

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What does prayer look like in contemporary America? With a welcoming tone and plainspoken diction, the forty poems in Hansen's collection explore that question. Including elements of autobiography, Your Twenty-First Century Prayer Life investigates Christianity in the present, depicting a faith in God that is continuously in flux. Readers journey through the seasons of the church year as Hansen recounts doubts, conversions, frustrations, and confessions. Ultimately, these poems are concerned as much with words as they are with the Word.

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Habitation of Wonder is an offering of poems that travels the intersection of the natural landscape and the landscape of spirit. Here, the moon is a «white comma / in the breath of space.» Crocuses are «ephemeral prophets, first of the sun's spring projects.» The ocean is «a vast / perpetual sacrifice on the altar / of the shell-glittering shore.» The collection opens with «Genesis,» a reimagining of the creation story with song as the divine instrument of creation. Five themed sections flow from «Genesis» like a musical thread, investigating the material elements from which we originate and in which we take shelter, as well as the gifts of language and faith, which make us more than merely «a constellation of salts.» In its own way, each poem invites the reader to «tenant beauty»–as well as to tenant uncertainty. When beauty and uncertainty collide, they spark wonder. As these poems suggest, wonder is simply another name for the world in which we live–and the world that lives in us.

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In Second Bloom, Silver looks unflinchingly and honestly at the suffering of cancer, while at the same time celebrating the possibility of joy, the persistence of beauty and love, the simultaneous winnowing and comfort of faith. These poems are contemplative and often personal, but reach out to the world as a whole: from IV poles to hula hoops, from riding a roller coaster with one's son to comforting a dying friend at Christmas. The poems glean their subject matter from ordinary life, from art, from the natural world. Silver's poetry attempts to preserve the world's luminous moments and to hold grace and despair simultaneously in the human heart.

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The poems in Phases are as interested in the creeping penumbral edge of language as they are in the shadowy fact of faith. Playful experiments with form swing to the conceptual ring's apogee, while a colloquy across history and place center the proverbial orbit.

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Killer gales and orcas, slickrock and storm toads, blackbirds, junipers, bathroom lizards–terrifying beauty infuses these poems as they probe and praise the tidal rhythms of love and faith, long-term. Meet Dreamer and Bean: reveling in God, each other, and Creation. Belief falls away for one of them like the self-pruning limb of a cottonwood tree. Marooned in the slash, the pair must trailblaze common ground. A lyrical field guide for journey mates, this collection explores perilous terrain for body and soul, and the price of a promise, over time.

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These Intricacies is a book of poems traversing the intersection of family, fatherhood, and faith. Set in shifting, vibrant spaces of a rich Kentucky landscape, and wrought with metaphysical crisis, this collection charts the slow, seismic shifts of growth bound up in understanding the nature of home. Dangling between struggle and tranquility, the poems in These Intricacies evoke a contemplative exploration of masculinity and vocation as the poet and reader journey together to discover and dissolve the discontinuities of how we are loved and how we can love others.

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Whether recalling long days on a tractor, late nights at prayer meeting, or the joyful heartbreak of raising a family, the poems in Twisted Shapes of Light take truth where they find it. William Jolliff wraps both arms around the phenomenon old Quakers called «that of God in everyone,» welcoming into his work a unique cast of characters seldom portrayed in contemporary poetry. The result is an honest struggle with faith and failure–and even an occasional revelation.

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Poems of nature and childhood initiate this poetic journey of the heart. The loss of family and friends prompts the search for divine relation. Pastoral lyrics, elegies, and colloquies culminate in the «necessary» breaking of the heart as it mystically «hatches» and the Incarnate life shines through.

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