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Within the bewildering paradox of suffering and beauty, we often miss the Invisible One. Never quite what you’d imagine, the nudge of his Presence can be mind-bending. More often, the Almighty gives no more than a slender warble. This collection is about finding the presence of God in spite of and because of the trappings that make us most human.
Pandemic at full tilt, the diagnosis came—cancer. Maybe you’ve known crisis or are walking a loved one through the terrible unknown. The heart plummets. The mind shrills. We blame genetics. Toxins. Lifestyle. How can we not blame ourselves? Can this be thrown on God? If we listen to the emptiness behind every unanswered why, what will we hear? While life and death circle overhead, heckle and intimidate, exhausting faith, these poems talk with touchstones around us. Eavesdrop on whispers for answers. These poems explore what we have—and what’s left. Who made the hawk? And the lionhearted songbird? What do they tell us about courage? What else is present?
Pandemic at full tilt, the diagnosis came--cancer. Maybe you've known crisis or are walking a loved one through the terrible unknown. The heart plummets. The mind shrills. We blame genetics. Toxins. Lifestyle. How can we not blame ourselves? Can this be thrown on God? If we listen to the emptiness behind every unanswered why, what will we hear? While life and death circle overhead, heckle and intimidate, exhausting faith, these poems talk with touchstones around us. Eavesdrop on whispers for answers. These poems explore what we have--and what's left. Who made the hawk? And the lionhearted songbird? What do they tell us about courage? What else is present?
The Farewell Suites is a collection of poems dealing with death and grief and arranged in sets focused on different members of the poet’s family—a brother who committed suicide, a child who died before birth, a father who slipped into delirium as he slipped out of life. These finely crafted poems capture the movements of the heart and are stunning tributes to love, patience, acceptance, and forgiveness. Though focused on the poet’s own loved ones, the poems speak of and to the hearts of all readers, expressing our shared anxieties and sorrows at the passing of those we love. The collection as a whole is deeply comforting, being shot through with both human warmth and heavenly hope. Indeed, Lansdown’s farewells anticipate reunion, when at last our mortality is overwhelmed by immortality.
You don’t have to be a skilled poet to see yourself living In a Strange Land. The poets found in this collection, however, not only recognize it, but express their varying experiences in ways that bring us along with them. We see their experiences—whether similar to our own or completely different—and find their poems ringing true in beautiful, painful, amusing, and fascinating ways. None of these ten poets has previously had a full-length poetry collection of their own—yet—but they are certainly all worthy of that honor. Keep an eye out for these poets in literary journals, chapbooks, and new books over the next while. Contributing poets: Ryan Apple, Susan Cowger, Jen Stewart Fueston, Laura Reece Hogan, Burl Horniachek, Miho Nonaka, Debbie Sawczak, Bill Stadick, James Tughan, Mary Willis
Fowler House, with its odd nooks, dicey wiring, and vast, unfinished attic playroom, shelters preteen Larkin. And yet, the house speaks of secrets no one else will. Wild creatures weigh in: a muskrat, fireflies, snails, a vesper bat. The menacing garfish. Troubled parents take on repairs: clanking radiators, crumbling plaster, and beloved Uncle Dunkel, finally home from the war in Korea, his mind splintering. Over three years, lived in the moment by Larkin—and relived in hindsight by Eldergirl—doors open and truth, long-stifled, emerges.
Let’s Call It Home is a slow search for wholeness in the fragmented landscape of language, place, family, and faith. These poems offer themselves as touchstones on the dizzying pilgrimage of ascent and descent towards rooted ground, that place we both hail from and are forever approaching, the home we both know intimately and perennially hunger for. And here, on this road, if the conclusions are provisional and the destination—as seen from this end of things—shifting, the hope compelling us out the door is as certain as the ache that sings us homeward and the unshakable sense of a steadying hand at our backs.
From its very first days, the church has been lifting up its songs and poems from the earth to the heavens, whether in praise, thanksgiving, or lament. Join poets from across Syria, Europe, Armenia, Ethiopia, China, and the Philippines in raising their voices. Learn about these great Christian singers from around the world, many of whom are hardly known at all among English readers, yet who are often considered the greatest poets in their own languages. Explore the many styles and genres which Christians have used to express their faith in song, whether hymn, psalm, dream vision, epic, drama, lyric, or didactic poem. Journey through the lives of biblical characters, through abstract theological and philosophical arguments, through moments of intense personal grief and joy, through the lives of saints and terrible sinners, sometimes even through heaven and hell themselves.
Two excerpts from spirituals, offered as epigraphs, foreshadow themes in Soon Done with the Crosses. The first song, "One of These Days," suggests inevitable burdens that all of us must bear at some point, while the second song, "Do Lord," supposes a glorious reward for those who faithfully endure. The poems in this book form a catalog of varied trials--both historical and contemporary--drawn from art, imaginings, the natural world, and aspects of the human condition, coupled with questions about eternity. Though while the collection begins with pleas for some bright assurance, it concludes in yet another vigil through dark, lonely hours, longing for morning's clarifying light.
These poems explore freely the familiar ground of the Gospels in the New Testament, often from an odd angle or unexpected point of view. Some are grounded in the author’s sense of the biblical present, others in the author’s or an imagined speaker’s present; all are accompanied by a triggering Scripture reference to provide background for the curious or a focus for further reflection. As stated in the author’s preface, “These are poems, not doctrinal or evangelistic treatises. Their task . . . is to work and wear well as poems.”