Citing a line from Elizabeth Bishop—“The bight is littered with old correspondences”—Scott Cairns avers: “So, also, is my mind.”

Searching for Home, Robert Pack’s splendid twenty-second collection of poems, written largely during his last year of life, centers on the search for meaning.

“Olga Sedakova is a writer of global significance. . .the publishing of this collection is a welcome stage in the reception of her exceptional genius in the West.” So writes Rowan Williams in his foreword to this translation of Old Songs.

Register now for the online book launch of Jonathan Geltner’s Absolute Music. Jonathan will read from the novel, discuss the book with Slant editor Gregory Wolfe, and answer your questions. July 27, 2022, 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, 5 pm Pacific. Via Zoom.

In the poem that opens this, his ninth collection, one of our most celebrated men of letters contemplates the “primordial tensions” felt in the crashing waves of a Northeaster, the glory and terror of the storm as “the real comes crashing finally down on you.”

We offer our hearty congratulations to Slant author Thom Satterlee, whose novel, God’s Liar, has won the Award of Merit in the 2021 Christianity Today Book Awards.

All three characters in this novel confront the question: when are we most ourselves—when we realize the selves we aspire to, or when we are unadorned? The characters converge on the same place: as they come together, each will come away changed.

The lyric poems in Phillippo’s radiant debut collection Thunderhead explore faith, motherhood, family, and community. As the author has put it, she has lived her life “backwards,” first raising a large family, then going back to school, and only now seeing her work find its way into print.

In All in a Garden Green, thirteen-year-old Erica Pickins walks through a door of the old manor house, Hengrave Hall, on a family visit to England and finds herself mistaken for the elder daughter of the house, Margaret, in the year 1578. Queen Elizabeth herself is about to arrive on a royal visit, and, because of her musical talent, Erica becomes the most important part of the desperate attempts by the Catholic family to entertain the Protestant Queen.

In the spirit of Muriel Spark and Walker Percy, The Age of Infidelity’s eleven stories embrace the comic, the absurd, and the dead serious. These stories travel through time, set in landscapes from the small-town South to New York City, from a parched Midwest to a deserted Dublin where American ex-pats hunker, these stories time-travel from our Jim Crow past to an imagined future of warehouses for the aged where robots do the nursing, where pet dogs commit suicide while young mothers spin yarns.

The poems in Toward inhabit the landscapes and seascapes of the wild southwest of Ireland, the islands of America’s Pacific Northwest, the poet’s home in Massachusetts, and then round again, back to the land north of Dublin. Moira Linehan’s eye and imagination capture lyrical, sonic, and imagistic details of these places. So, too, their embedded history: the Famine, the days of the whaling industry, and the speaker’s paternal genealogy are all woven in.

Peggy Rosenthal reviews Long after Lauds in Christian Century: “These poems probe what God and human life are like long after you can simply praise them. With delightful wit and grace, Hathaway explores in these poems what it means to live a secular life after being grounded in Christian community.”

Justyna Braun discusses the latest book from Daniel Taylor, Woe to the Scribes and Parisees, in Humanum Review.

“Somebody we’ve all heard of once turned water into wine. With this project it’s more like turning vinegar into arsenic. In the first place, most everyone on the translation committee arrived with suspicions. And those suspicions were quickly confirmed.”

“Hotly in Pursuit of the Real is a coy memoir. It is offered by a man who deftly sculpts his persona, a memoirist apparently schooled in both Midwestern reticence and the decorous manners of an old-school intelligentsia.”

World Without End, Claude Wilkinson’s fourth poetry collection, takes its title from the last words of the Gloria Patri. But the preceding words—“as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be”— also echo the book’s overarching theme: the seemingly infinite spiritual implications woven throughout our experience in the natural world.