In the opening poem of Matthew Porto’s dazzling debut collection, we hear the voice of the recurring angel figure for the first time, commanding us to “Get used to the light.” That light—blinding, mysterious, unsettling, but occasionally illuminating—shows up again and again in Porto’s taut, elegant poems.
The people in There Will Never Be Another Night Like This have one thing in common: they’re in flux. Will they pivot and move on gracefully, or stumble and fall?
There is an ancient Christian saying from the Patristic Era which is known in its most concise form as lex orandi, lex credendi. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church translates it: “The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays.”
An old man—poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar—sifts through the broken fragments of his memory as he recounts what it was like to grow up in Warsaw during the German occupation of World War II.
This is a book about a girl who left home without quite meaning to. One evening, doing her algebra homework, the sixteen-year-old abruptly realizes the tight-knit fundamentalist community she has been raised in may not have all the answers it claims to have.
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.
Shortly after learning they would become the parents of twins, the physician-writer Amit Majmudar and his wife received a devastating in utero diagnosis: one of the twins had a potentially fatal congenital heart defect.
With the rise of anti-Semitism, extremism, political polarization, mass shootings, the fraying of Black-Jewish-Asian alliances, and the loss of personal connections during the age of Covid, where is God, and how can we find the joy and wonder in our lives? How do we come to terms with loss? How can art and language help us to cope with life and honor the dead?
In this fourth and final entry in the Jon Mote Mysteries, our accidental sleuth and his sister Judy find themselves entangled in an international web of evil done and evil revenged.
In 1913, Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism, created a masterpiece: The Fate of the Animals. With its violent slashes of color and line, the painting seemed to pre-figure both the outbreak of World War I and, more eerily, Marc’s own death in an artillery barrage at the Battle of Verdun three years later.
In Sister Zero, a woman who never wanted children suddenly becomes a mother to her nine-year-old nephew after her sister commits suicide at age 34. Fifteen years later, the boy will also kill himself and in almost exactly the same manner.
In the Unwalled City takes its title from Epicurus, who wrote: “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.” This affecting book—which weaves prose memoir with poetry—explores that feeling of being open to attack—in this case the pain of grief after Robert Cording’s thirty-one-year-old son Daniel died.
On an eerily warm October evening in a suburb of Detroit, a new father and struggling fantasy novelist named McPhail gazes at a honey locust tree. The sight triggers a memory of the sudden, inexplicable death of Hannah, whom he loved when they were both fourteen.
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.”
In 1980, two men sit down to record a conversation. They have much in common: both are passionate, articulate thinkers. But their differences are just as striking….
Dramatically and verbally intense, these plays memorably open up the space where faith and imagination speak to each other.
When Teffy Byrne steals a dead sex worker’s coded journal from a local art show, she thinks it might shed light on an unsolved murder committed seven years ago.
From acclaimed crime novelist Gar Anthony Haywood comes a riveting tale unlike any he’s told before….
California poet Karen An-hwei Lee, inspired by Virgil, has created her own dense, richly-layered collection of “Neo-Georgics,” constituting an extended exploration of such motifs as happiness, olive groves, vineyards, soil chemistries, the seacoast, and the birth of trees.