Poiema Poetry Series

In a series of dramatic monologues, first-century men and women--some real, some imaginary--remember, often from the perspective of old age, their encounters with Jesus and reflect on the significance of those encounters. Some comprehend and welcome him as Messiah. Others comprehend him only as an extraordinary figure and remain puzzled by their memories. A few are angered by him and bitterly reject any claim their encounter might make on them. The monologues and songs are arranged to be read simply as a book of poems or as a series of meditations spanning the ministry of Jesus to be read one a day during the season of Lent.

Collage of Seoul is a book of poetry tracing the spiritual journey of a man who, unnamed at birth, looks to both Eastern and Western cultures to form an identity through a love story that culminates with the decisive act of naming his two daughters. Through a mix of narrative and lyric poetry, Collage of Seoul transports the reader into a simulated flight between dreamscape and reality, faith and doubt, and allegory and biography as we are invited to explore the dangerous field of investigating who we are and where we come from.

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.

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.

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.

In various voices and with a range of strategies, these poems speak of and into the collisions we experience day in and day out--collisions with nature, art, language, religion, family, imagination, new and old ways of seeing and navigating the world--collisions that result in loss and sadness, confusion and laughter, gratitude and amazement. Still Working It Out, a collection that moves freely between memory and invention, embodies a faithful struggle to attend to and engage life with all senses on high alert for what may crush or sustain or gloriously transfigure.

These poems--selected from the award-winning poet's output over four decades--more explicitly than any of his prior volumes address the centrality of Christian vision to his aims and aspirations. Lea looks unflinchingly at all that may challenge his faith: the cruelties of both natural and human worlds, the attractions of jolly, good-hearted secularism, the distortions of doctrinaire religiosity, the seeming pointlessness of untimely deaths; but his faith in Christian redemption shines through even the bleakest of his poems.

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.

The Turning Aside is about stepping out of our routines--like Moses turning from tending sheep, like a certain man selling his everything to buy a field--to take time to consider the ways of God in the company of some of the finest poets of our time. Turn aside with such established poets as Wendell Berry, Les Murray, Luci Shaw, Elizabeth Jennings, Richard Wilbur, Dana Gioia, and Christian Wiman--and respond to their invitation for us to muse along with them. Walk with poets from various parts of the planet, even though some of them are less known, whose words have been carefully crafted to encourage us in our turning aside. The Turning Aside is a collection of Christian poetry from dozens of the most spiritually insightful poetic voices of recent years. It is a book I have long dreamed of compiling, and it has grown beyond my mere imagining in its fulfillment.

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.

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.

Reaching Forever is Philip C. Kolin's ninth collection of poems, the sixth to focus entirely on spiritual poetry. Like the poet's most recent book, Benedict's Daughter: Poems (2017), the poems in this new collection are anchored in Scripture. Organized according to major Christian topics--sheep, water, God's names, eschatology--Reaching Forever is ripe with scriptural parables, symbols and imagery, settings, allusions, and speakers ranging from God to biblical characters to contemporary figures. Consistent with the Poiema Series, these poems open the "windows" of faith. But they are not simple catechesis. Rather, they "leap over the sills," to quote D. S. Martin, providing new ways of looking at Holy Writ and applying them to today's world--to see the sacred in the daily. Undeniably the most distinctive feature of Reaching Forever is the large number of poems set in the contemporary world, but contextualized through the Bible. For instance, a poem on the polyandrous Samaritan woman is paired with one about a homeless woman in a large city who also has had many husbands and children. A long litany poem about God's appearances in Scripture is followed by one on catadores (garbage pickers) who hear rumbling below the filth and wonder what God's voice is saying. A short poem on the riches of Cana seques to a spiritual lyric about monks who transform donors' pennies into bread for the poor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The poems in Graham Hillard's debut collection are personal and world-historical, as remote as fifteenth-century Rome and as near as the American landscape. Here are poems of music, violence, faith, doubt, and the creaturely world, composed in the unignorable shadow of Holy Scripture. Here, too, are childhood and child-rearing, small sagas of fortune and failure across the generations. Like the dissonant chords for which the book is named, Hillard's poems seek resolution but find it only sparingly. A bold and surprising new collection, Wolf Intervals takes place at the heart of that quest.

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.

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.

The Book of Bearings puts the puzzle pieces of the New World together without a picture on the puzzle box. The characters struggle to situate themselves between what they were and what they are supposed to become. The poems include voices from the mid-nineteenth-century Cherokee Female Seminary in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the mid-twentieth-century Eskimo experience in Alaska, as well as personal narratives. This book addresses the Native American process of assimilation from first contact through education in the civilized world. It is a view of that world from the eyes of those who were seen as the conquered. The Book of Bearings seeks its bearing in a shifting world. Often it focuses on the effects of Christianity. The characters use the new language to frame their various experiences. They use language as a tool for understanding what cannot fully be understood, which, for the believer, is the transformation in Christ when he left the world charged with his 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."

It has been said that a psalm is a singing back to the Divine. Cup My Days Like Water is an offering of seventy-five poems--or psalms--rooted in the ancient biblical psalms. Borrowing from the raw honesty, radiant confidence, and unashamed lament of the biblical psalms, this sequence of devotional poems traces one person's grappling with the themes of nature, illness, justice, beauty, suffering, the character of God, and the pilgrim life. Together, these poems probe the elegant and harsh realities of this world and explore what it means to forge a path of faith in light of those realities. Cup My Days Like Water tenders a new ancient way to pray that can help us navigate our disenchanted world with a tested hope.

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?

In Ponds, Jane Clark Scharl explores the mysterious relationship between change and repetition: seemingly contradictory, these two weave together so tightly in human existence that they cannot be separated. Speaking in a variety of voices--from a young mother mourning her own mother to Penelope, wife of Ulysses, Persephone, and Theoderic the Ostrogoth--Ponds is a polyphonous meditation on loss and gain, activity and stillness, and the nature of God, both hidden and revealed.

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.

Marjorie Stelmach's new collection, The Angel of Absolute Zero, seeks to engage its readers in thoughtful reflection on our difficult times. The opening section of the book, entitled Canticle of Want, introduces the collection's governing characteristic: these poems want a lot. They ask us to view our damaged planet and acknowledge our complicity; to question "how it is we have come to this" and take heart in our wish to be more worthy; to accept suffering and loss and yet feel gratitude, expect joy. In short, these poems aspire to "teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom."