Liturgical Calendar: Poems

By Kevin Brown

Using the structure of the liturgical calendar and the lives of the saints for inspiration, Kevin Brown explores not only faith, but subjects ranging from love to childhood and from grammar to grace. The saints' backgrounds serve as metaphors for our lives today, as we struggle with our mortality and our morality. In these poems, Brown is able to laugh at himself and his failings while reminding us of our own. He points out where our various approaches to faith make us better people and where we fail to follow what we tell others to do. In these poems, the miraculous becomes ordinary even as ordinary events and people are imbued with the sacred, granting readers hope for themselves and for the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781498203760

Kevin Brown

Kevin Brown is a professor at Lee University. He has published articles on Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, Tony Earley and Ralph Ellison, in addition to a critical study of authors who attempt to retell the gospel stories: They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. In addition, he has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press), and a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again.

Book preview

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Liturgical Calendar

Poems

Kevin Brown

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Liturgical Calendar

Poems

Copyright © 2014 Kevin Brown. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0375-3

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0376-0

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 07/20/2015

for the saints,

known and unknown,

living and dead

Our calendars, once full of feasts of virgins, martyrs, and confessors, now are crowded with unholy days. The day they struck our shining cities; the day we leveled theirs; the day they killed our innocents; the day we did the same to theirs. So to have a poem and some better news, every day, is no bad thing.

—Thomas Lynch in Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans

Acknowledgments

Leprosy in Middle School was published in the Fall 2010 issue of Cottonwood.

Why Do You Stand Here Looking? was published in the Spring 2011 issue of Bluestem.

Free Love was published in the Spring 2010 issue of Stickman Review.

Taking (the) Charge and Catechism were published in the 2010 issue of The Heartland Review.

Questions of Etiquette was published in the Spring 2010 issue of Spoon River Poetry Review.

Respice Finem was published in the 2010 issue of Palimpsest.

Wiping Her Feet on Your Doormat was published in the 2010 issue of Poetry South.

Lawn Care was published in the Fall 2010 issue of Third Wednesday.

Last Days was published in the January 2012 issue of Barely South Review.

Spiritual Exercises was published in the April 2011 issue of Barely South Review.

Dry Mouth was published in the Spring 2011 issue of New Plains Review.

He Always Spent Friday Nights at Home, Anyway was published in the Spring 2011 issue of Wisconsin Review.

Heavenly Appearances and Social Climbing were published in the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Valley Voices.

Superstitious Children was published in the 2011 issue of Licking River Review.

Dangling was published in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee (2013).

There are Rules was published in American Society: What Poets See (2012).

All Saints Day was published in St. Peter’s B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints (2014).

At Least I Kept My Kidneys was published in the Fall 2013 issue of Mount Hope.

Mustering Storks was published in the Fall 2013 issue of South85.

Suburban Tennessee Poverty, 1977 was published in the 2014 issue of The Lindenwood Review.

Let He Who is Without is forthcoming in Vending Machine Press.

My Accent Always Marks Me As a Tourist and What is Your Life Like were published in the Spring 2014 issue of The Alembic.

A portion of this collection was the winning collection in the Split Oak Press Chapbook Contest and was published as Holy Days: Poems.

Thanks to CatholicCulture.org, where I gathered much of my information on the saints and their lives.

The First Sunday of Advent

Not the moment before two

lovers’ lips touch

for the first time, or before the bat

meets the ball in the bottom

of the ninth, or before the opening

of the envelope containing

the unexpected a minute before

the mail was delivered,

not the moment where time stands

still, moves slowly, or speeds

up, but moves through time

as if