Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World


Book Description

“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.




Ordinary Blessings


Book Description

The ordinary moments of life can be sacred, if we simply take a moment to notice. This collection of prayers, poems, and meditations offers a brief respite from the hectic, harried pace of our days. Open it when the spirit moves you or when the spirit feels distant--the words will be here to inspire, calm, and encourage you either way. From gifted poet and empathetic pastor Meta Herrick Carlson, Ordinary Blessings collects blessings for loving yourself, enduring hard things, authenticity, living with others, and the rhythms of each day. Pause, take a deep breath, and open these pages to find that you've been standing on holy ground all along.




After Prayer


Book Description

This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works. At the heart of this collection is a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert’s exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', each one describing prayer in an arresting metaphor such as ‘the church's banquet’, ‘reversed thunder’, ‘the Milky Way’, ‘the bird of paradise’ and ‘something understood’. In conversation with each of these, Malcolm’s sonnets offer profound insights into the nature of communion with God in all circumstances and conditions. Recognising that all poetry is a pursuit of prayer, After Prayer also includes forty five more widely ranging new poems, including a sonnet sequence on the seven heavens.




Worldly Things


Book Description

Finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry “Sometimes,” Michael Kleber-Diggs writes in this winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, “everything reduces to circles and lines.” In these poems, Kleber-Diggs names delight in the same breath as loss. Moments suffused with love—teaching his daughter how to drive; watching his grandmother bake a cake; waking beside his beloved to ponder trumpet mechanics—couple with moments of wrenching grief—a father’s life ended by a gun; mourning children draped around their mother’s waist; Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Even in the refuge-space of dreams, a man calls the police on his Black neighbor. But Worldly Things refuses to “offer allegiance” to this centuries-old status quo. With uncompromising candor, Kleber-Diggs documents the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. “Let’s create folklore side-by-side,” he urges, asking us to aspire to a form of nurturing defined by tenderness, to a kind of community devoted to mutual prosperity. “All of us want,” after all, “our share of light, and just enough rainfall.” Sonorous and measured, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics. Additional Recognition: A New York Times Book Review "New & Noteworthy Poetry" Selection A Library Journal "Poetry Title to Watch 2021" A Chicago Review of Books "Poetry Collection to Read in 2021" A Reader's Digest "14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now" Selection A Books Are Magic "Recommended Reading" Selection An Indie Gift Guide 2021 Indie Next Selection




When Poets Pray


Book Description

Two dozen select prayer poems to learn from and live with Poetry and prayer are closely related. We often look to poets to give language to our deepest hopes, fears, losses—and prayers. Poets slow us down. They teach us to stop and go in before we go on. They play at the edges of mystery, holding a tension between line and sentence, between sense and reason, between the transcendent and the deeply, comfortingly familiar. When Poets Pray contains thoughtful meditations by Marilyn McEntyre on choice poems/prayers and poems about prayer. Her beautifully written reflections are contemplative exercises, not scholarly analyses, meant more as invitation than instruc¬tion. Here McEntyre shares gifts that she herself has received from poets who pray, or who reflect on prayer, believing that they have other gifts to offer readers seeking spiritual companionship along our pilgrim way. POETS DISCUSSED IN THIS BOOK Hildegard of Bingen Lucille Clifton Walter Chalmers Smith Robert Frost Wendell Berry Joy Harjo John Donne Gerard Manley Hopkins Said Marilyn McEntyre George Herbert Thomas Merton Denise Levertov Scott Cairns Mary Oliver Marin Sorescu T. S. Eliot Richard Wilbur Francisco X. Alarcon Anna Kamienska Michael Chitwood Psalm 139:1-12




Twenty Poems to Pray


Book Description

Drawing from the poetry of generations of esteemed writers Gary Bouchard shows how poems often express the longings of the human heart as a kind of prayer. Emily Dickinson, Rev. Rowan Williams, Pope John Paul II, Christina Rossetti, Robert Frost, and Fr. Kilian McDonnell, OSB, among others, offer readers an inspiring path to reflect upon and pray with poetic verse. Arranged under six engaging themes, each selection uses the words of poets as vehicles to prompt “heaven in ordinary” or to praise like “exalted manna”; to find the right “paraphrase” for your own soul or maybe sense your “soul’s blood”; to muster up from your grief or anger “reversed thunder” or dare to articulate from your own personal anguish “Christ-side-piercing spear.”




The Woman's Book of Prayer


Book Description

Increase Your Happiness Through Faith and Spirituality Prayer takes many forms: Sitting in silence, walking mediation, using prayer beads or folding your hands every night and talking to God are all forms of prayer. If you want something different in your life, you must pray a different prayer. We are constantly communing with the Divine throughout our daily lives―even in the most ordinary activities. The Woman’s Book of Prayer will show you all the ways you can pray, so that you can find the methods that work for you. Draw inspiration from a variety of sources: Comprised of both mindfulness meditations, prayer practices and selections of sacred texts, poems and blessings, The Woman’s Book of Prayer by Becca Anderson, author of Prayers for Hard Times and Every Day Thankful, gathers words of encouragement, comfort and sustenance for women. From Peace Pilgrim to Psalms to Dolly Parton, this collection of power thoughts and purposeful prayers will help you get inspired, and more importantly, stay inspired. Change your life by changing your prayer: Author Becca Anderson credits her recovery from a serious illness to the power of daily prayer. But she had to change the way she prayed and set off on an exploration of the myriad methods people use and uncovering the world’s best prayers. The Woman’s Book of Prayer shows how to change your life by changing your prayer. By carefully and consciously choosing affirming thoughts and deliberately looking for blessings at every opportunity, you will literally create a new life for yourself. The Woman’s Book of Prayer will help you: • Discover how to focus on what you DO want, not what you don’t want • Learn how to make your prayers positive and affirming • find out how to get more of what you want in your life




Poems & Prayers for Children


Book Description




Borders and Belonging


Book Description

A leading poet and a theologian reflect on the Old Testament story of Ruth, a tale that resonates deeply in today's world with its themes of migration, the stranger, mixed cultures and religions, law and leadership, women in public life, kindness, generosity and fear. Ruth's story speaks directly to many of the issues and deep differences that Brexit has exposed and to the polarisation taking place in many societies. Pádraig Ó Tuama and Glenn Jordan bring the redemptive power of Ruth to bear on today's seemingly intractable social and political divisions, reflecting on its challenges and how it can help us be effective in the public square, amplify voices which are silenced, and be communities of faith in our present day. Over the last year, the material that inspired this book has been used with over 6000 people as a public theology initiative from Corrymeela, Ireland's longest-established peace and reconciliation centre. It has been met with an overwhelming response because of its immediacy and relevance, enabling people with opposing views to come together and be heard.




Poetry and Prayer


Book Description

Interdisciplinary and ecumenical in scope, Poetry and Prayer offers theoretical discussion on the profound connection between poetic inspiration and prayer as well as reflection on the work of individual writers and the traditions within which they stand. An international range of established and new scholars in literary studies and theology offer unique contributions to the neglected study of poetry in relation to prayer. Part I addresses the relationship of prayer and poetry. Parts II and III consider these and related ideas from the point of view of their implementation in a range of different authors and traditions, offering case studies from, for example, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare and Herbert, as well as twentieth-century poets such as Thomas Merton, Denise Levertov, W.H. Auden and R.S. Thomas.