Lobela is the first volume of poetry written by Justo Bolekia Boleka, poet, author, and linguist. In these poems, Boleka expresses his connection to his native land, Equatorial Guinea, the only nation in Sub-Saharan Africa whose language of colonization is Spanish. Gods, goddesses, adoration of elders, customs, longing for a lost land, and lost way of life are all part of these poetic expressions. Originally in Spanish, replete with son ...
A minister's wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband's work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter&a ...
Committing theology to poetry is not new, but it's not wildly common. The Sunrise Liturgy aims to do just that. It is a sequence, like liturgy, with a start and a procession and a finish. The sun does the processing, and the play on sun and Son is never far from sight. Sunrise gives the cantus firmus to this theological theme and variations, where the going is by turns easy, by turns thickly polyphonic–take a deep breath! The cantus firmus ...
The Earth's thin crust of organic matter and the still thinner crust of the spirit is the most concentrated, the most suggestive part of the cosmos. It in every way exceeds itself by pointing above its horizontal surface towards vertical transcendence. However, it can never leave itself behind and always carries itself with itself in every ascent. Poetry attends to the resultant human diagonal. –from the preface to the first sequence, «On ...
In Rising, poet Jane Beal goes in search of America. She sings the Cherokee Creation story, imagining dialogue between Sky-Woman and First Man. She remembers being a child and exchanging her blood with a Cherokee friend, and then, years later, the birth of that friend's son, Usquaniqdi, whose name means «miracle.» In her poems, she gives voice to women from American history such as the mother Pocahontas, the midwife Martha Ballard, ...
The 365 poems in this collection, one for every day of the year, are a journey through prayer. The objective of the poems is to serve as an accompaniment to prayer, silently, in the form of a verse. The initial inspiration of these writings was from the Psalms, but there is referenced material throughout the Scriptures, as well as events that occurred in history and in the author's daily life. With only a few exceptions, the prayer/poems ar ...
In pruning, a decision must be made whether to «either slowly hollow, heartwood rotting outward, / or grow from green into a fiery blaze in autumn.» Pruning Burning Bushes is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of the natural and spiritual worlds with the personal and familial worlds. The book wrestles with this decision–to grow or to rot. Walking from the valley to the highest summit and back down into the depths of the canyon ...
While it is impossible to know how or when a unified view of the self and the universe became divided in our Western view of things, Gary D. Swaim's poems contend that our world is not dualistic. Should we look to Saint Paul or Saint Augustine as responsible for the world's heart rift–even occasional heart drift? More likely, the «fault» lies in our habit of seeing things as either physical or spiritual, material or immaterial, for t ...
