Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Divine Fire: Poems
    Divine Fire: Poems
    Divine Fire: Poems
    Ebook89 pages44 minutes

    Divine Fire: Poems

    By David Woo

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    How to find wisdom and spiritual sustenance in a time of crisis and uncertainty? In Divine Fire, David Woo answers with poems that move from private life into a wider world of catastrophe and renewal. The collection opens in the most personal space, a bedroom, where the chaotic intrusions of adulthood revive the bafflements of childhood. The perspective soon widens from the intimacies of love to issues of national and global import, such as race and class inequality, and then to an unspoken cataclysm that is, by turns, a spiritual apocalypse and a crisis that could be in the news today, like climate change or the pandemic. In the last part of the book, the search for ever-vaster scales of meaning, both sacred and profane, finds the poet trying on different personas and sensibilities—comic, ironic, earnest, literary, self-mythologizing— before reaching a luminous détente with the fearful and the sublime. The divine fire of lovers fading in memory—“shades of the men in my blood”—becomes the divine fire of a larger spiritual reckoning. In his new book of poems, Woo provides an astonishing vision of the world right now through his exploration of timeless themes of love, solitude, art, the body, and death.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2021
    ISBN9780820358857
    Divine Fire: Poems
    Author

    David Woo

    DAVID WOO was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. The son of Chinese immigrants, Woo studied at Harvard, earned an MA in Chinese studies from Yale University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His first collection of poetry, The Eclipses, won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. Woo’s work has been widely published and anthologized in publications such as the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, and The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America.

    Related to Divine Fire

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      In a hotel in a small town in Norfolk I am listening to someonethrowing glass bottles into a metal bin: toss-shatter, toss-shatter.There are no other sounds; it’s a quiet afternoonbut the one tossing them has a sense of rhythm and I havea sense that

      5 min read

    • Article

      Oh, Corona

      Jan 1, 2024

      Books The Lights by Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023 128 pp., $26.00 (hardcover) According to the latest Times article on the qualitative merits of bot art, Ben Lerner has lent excerpts from his new poetry collection to a group of venture c

      7 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work

      Dec 15, 2018

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
      6 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2024

      I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

      6 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2017

      Sep 11, 2017

      Isn’t that one of the purest goals of poetry—to justify our breaths? To recognize that we matter? The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Paper Wasp

      Jun 3, 2019

      The Paper Wasp
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      I’ll Have None of You: Reconsidering the Female Death Drive

      Mar 28, 2018

      On its most visceral level, Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny is about infanticide: “The baby is dead,” we read on its very first line. What could possibly jar after that? But this literary blockbuster (Chanson Douce, or “sweet song,” in its original

      5 min read

    • Article

      Spellcheck

      Jan 1, 2019

      Whose history I do not know. I do know I’ve been e-upbraided for my fast and loose spelling of Woden, the god whose last worshipper must have slipped under the sod during the medieval period, somewhere in the 10th century—imagine those bog-soaked des

      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Obsession, Collection, and Connection: On Pixar’s ‘Soul’ and Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses

      Jan 21, 2021

      Writing that takes a pin and drives it through obsession’s abdomen, splaying it open like one of Nabokov’s butterfly specimens. The post Obsession, Collection, and Connection: On Pixar’s ‘Soul’ and Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses appeared first on T

      7 min read

    • Article

      FLICKERS APR Books

      Sep 1, 2019

      FLICKERS APR Books
      16 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    • Article

      My Own Personal Herakles

      Sep 29, 2017

      My Own Personal Herakles
      20 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: June 2018

      Jun 5, 2018

      Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in June. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes “I wanted to have my form and explode it too,” said Wanda Coleman of sonnets. Hayes names her with gratitude in this book. Ath

      5 min read

    • Article

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jan 1, 2019

      What you called a cloud was not a cloud. I am in hell here. Hell is a partywhere I don’t sing, and don’t dance, and someone turns to me and says, “Youare a very pretty girl. Don’t ever forget that.” I spend all night tramping up and down the staircas

      2 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: October 2017

      Oct 3, 2017

      Poetry is malleable and moving; a form that will never tire of importance. The post Must-Read Poetry: October 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Divine Fire

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Divine Fire - David Woo

      ,Pabook_preview_excerpt.htmleVKnFJ뉌 CǶ`[,!d{twsrr"ErPJ{{quv{Hnl9:s``3הBD˾N j= 2&6UGqv1mɸ[ y Go' hzۇ}N㔞ULʄ;H3~`>/S!wPCo:dBLT>"? 2Yd:#fs4yp'8={J9ߢR96OZk|F3v)1'[3a :Lt31a9U1$pV N72{y|4-դ0*$7Qog>xa].Wo}IcDkMhQ~ }q#)x89YvsK1]%c!I`ĨeyϱŵXEeաMtK=\A?)emhfYǣ+3LyT\ZZqWOHsq30#A_l8`D\l+.r~7iF+vwK{ʘj (+0.dD 2LGSQ:۰AFدg[\v{F ak E;m:RvG7ۻt~>~Dnuw`:=0˓ ΁]IYTOfpy}zԋ'v(gHdܞL?@{,9f_m^J9L\ugMlړo0 _֏9+5U$f[8|j-KtHAJ .~;Ir)XbhB$Z;1)Ok!*2EgQđG @ 瓭J+ru~ Jꩋ#qt4בz@K+QGD妔r8mw`"ׅ]r1O荐9+!^(~y9˯2ݟx('I>9eQLo,}Û- /m3ocUe$QNae3SqS)KNEPRn;(9rռ,;J|=IrZtZ^gGJt[4r4C9qM;@)=}ĭ!pΜJ1TfM7 j/;Mw
      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1