Description
Description
This debut collection explores the implications of how we might experience the Imago Dei in the midst of a culture fraught with racism, violence, and the simple limits of our human frailty. Throughout, Jason Myers clings to a "hope-glutted" belief that all things may be made holy despite their capacity for destruction. Martin Luther King and Billie Holiday rest alongside Charles Darwin and Anthony Bourdain in these poems of prayer. Whether drawing from the Bible, the blues, or the natural world, Myers' prophetic voice leads us down a path that can find wonder in the wreckage buzzing all around us and stirring within our own souls.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
Praise forMaker of Heaven &:
"These poems seek the name inside each living thing, the song inside the song, the story inside the story, and a belonging deeper than race, gender, class, and even species. When Jason Myers' vision penetrates the body and finds the laws that manifest the body, when he sees through our human history, recent and ancient, and discovers older imperatives at war and in harmony, the reader feels sometimes troubled by his hard-won revelations of human nature, consistently surprised by the courage, the understanding, and the beauty of his process, and finally grateful for having been granted such sight."-Li-Young Lee, Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award
"The poems in Jason Myers' debut collection, Maker of Heaven &, at once grasp at and let go, approach and surrender, engaging the very gestures of the religious life, carving the path of the seeker. Vast, they contain multitudes: 'What is all around me, the past, the air, the lone pear on a tree in need of company, I absorb, & what is within me spools out into the day . . . like breath, like a song.' These are praise songs from a true believer, a priest, and they meet our precarious moment and transcend, cracking meaning out of experience and rending blessings from everyday life."
-Carrie Fountain, Former Poet Laureate of Texas
"Maker of Heaven & is a book of wonder, and in it Jason Myers suggests that what we wonder can indeed be made into art as God must have felt wonder when making the cosmos: 'There was a secret / name inside every living thing, / a song underneath every song.' Each of these poems seems rooted in a belief in 'brutal brotherly love.' These poems are a testament to a poet's faith in the word."
-Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
"These poems seek the name inside each living thing, the song inside the song, the story inside the story, and a belonging deeper than race, gender, class, and even species. When Jason Myers' vision penetrates the body and finds the laws that manifest the body, when he sees through our human history, recent and ancient, and discovers older imperatives at war and in harmony, the reader feels sometimes troubled by his hard-won revelations of human nature, consistently surprised by the courage, the understanding, and the beauty of his process, and finally grateful for having been granted such sight."-Li-Young Lee, Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award
"The poems in Jason Myers' debut collection, Maker of Heaven &, at once grasp at and let go, approach and surrender, engaging the very gestures of the religious life, carving the path of the seeker. Vast, they contain multitudes: 'What is all around me, the past, the air, the lone pear on a tree in need of company, I absorb, & what is within me spools out into the day . . . like breath, like a song.' These are praise songs from a true believer, a priest, and they meet our precarious moment and transcend, cracking meaning out of experience and rending blessings from everyday life."
-Carrie Fountain, Former Poet Laureate of Texas
"Maker of Heaven & is a book of wonder, and in it Jason Myers suggests that what we wonder can indeed be made into art as God must have felt wonder when making the cosmos: 'There was a secret / name inside every living thing, / a song underneath every song.' Each of these poems seems rooted in a belief in 'brutal brotherly love.' These poems are a testament to a poet's faith in the word."
-Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Belle Point Press
Pub date:
2023-03-07
Length:
100 pages
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