August 24, 2020
By locating questions of faith and doubt within the atomic, these poems enact a theology where the divine resides within instead of above the physical world.
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June 13, 2019
Melissa Reeser Poulin’s latest chapbook, Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press), is a journey down the fathoms-deep well of human experience. The poet’s word choice and lines are clear and clean like cold water––and just as refreshing. Poulin plunges the reader into wanting, anticipation, anxiety, and joy.
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March 28, 2019
Forugh says: “Writing had cost me so much, but it was also the thing that saved me, that allowed me to live. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be yet, but I was beginning to resemble her now.”
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February 28, 2019
In Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else...Mock explores gender equality, singleness, body image, and other cultural expectations that manifest inequity, courageously advocating for a world that embraces all people...Worthy...call[s] upon Christians to “remake the church from within..."
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January 22, 2019
"To be a former believer," she writes in her evocative first essay collection, Interior States, “is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime." Each of her fifteen essays, wide-ranging in their content, contains an element of that circling back around: to her Midwestern evangelical childhood or to her time at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where the threading began to unravel.
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February 15, 2018
At the moment, the assumption to question is that we humans have a right to be on earth and that it will indefinitely support us. When the very ground is taken from beneath our feet, where can we stand? What is left to us, when the familiar forms of our physical existence are taken away? Nothing, perhaps—yet I wonder.
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February 06, 2018
Niemeyer foregrounds the ways the letters reflect the writer’s intense moral and spiritual concerns. “That these letters … read much like homilies is a key to their power and genius,” he claims, departing without apology from those who find them more manic than ministerial.
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December 21, 2017
As I carried Paul J. Willis 2016 collection, Getting to Gardisky Lake with me for the last several weeks, I found innumerable mantrams among the poems, grounding myself amidst Willis’ stories of the wilderness, the classroom, of aging and of loving. It seems there is nothing his poetry does not touch...
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December 05, 2017
As Sexton reminds readers at the beginning of her collection, “The very Word of God is, after all, a collection of broken stories about broken people just like us.” God will not be shocked by your failure, fear, or anger. Your wounds are welcome before God and God’s people.
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November 28, 2017
Collage of Seoul begins with words we do not hear, words meant only for God. From the start, we know these poems will be both personal and private. Part of the mystery here is the deep mystery of another’s life and heart. Then, the shadow of the plane in the trees gestures toward the mysterious presence of God, and, as the poet wrestles with God, “there’s comfort in the fading echo,” he says, “the tail of the plane vanishing / into layers of mysterious clouds.”
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