Book Description

An original multimedia collection of lauded humanist poetry is the latest offering from Humanist Press, the expanding publishing arm of the American Humanist Association. Questions About God from humanist poet Stephen Perry is being called “. . . an excitingly different read” by the New York Journal of Books, as well as “challenging and thought-provoking,” by Midwest Book Review, concluding that “Questions About God delves into fundamental mysteries with a unique and insightful flair.” The ebook contains 25 of the author’s creative photo montages and photos, as well as his dramatic reading of a number of poems, including the 121-line title poem. Stephen Perry’s boundary-shattering poems feature many diverse voices. Complex, unpredictable narrators like Perry are rare in poetry, but even rarer is his range of subject matter, drawing on philosophy, science, history, etymology, archeology, psychology, poetry, sexuality, music, etc., in fact anything of human interest. Award-winning poet Frank X. Gaspar tells readers to “be prepared for a maelstrom ride through art, religion, philosophy, sexuality—in fact all things human, where categories break down and images meld into new relationships with one another.” Perry’s Questions About God combines world mythologies of an astonishing range—from Greek to Judeo-Christian, from Hindu to Buddhist, even flirting with American Indian Blackfoot lore—coalescing all into a synthesis of science and myth in a grand celebration of the natural world. The perspective is wholly humanist, of interest to skeptics and agnostics and atheists and all those who distain the absurdities, crudities, and cruelties of a simplistic fundamentalist mindset. * * * In Questions About God, Stephen Perry manifests a poetry of collision and surfeit, an inclusive portrait (including his photographs) of a poet’s mind working furiously in our raw and ambivalent post-post-modern dawns and gloamings. Be prepared for a maelstrom ride through art, religion, philosophy, sexuality—in fact all things human, where categories break down and images meld into new relationships with one another. One thinks of Rabelais wrestling with Descartes somewhere backstage, behind the curtain—or of Borges’ library, where the only true portrait of the world can be the world itself in its entirety. In the marvelous prose poem “Monologue,” Perry’s narrator says, “…I have finally done it, explained myself to myself.” Perhaps he means the poet, but in doing so, both visually and verbally, he brings the reader along on a profound journey into the inner worlds that reside deeply within the inner worlds. — Frank Gaspar, author of five collections of poetry and two novels. The Holyoke won the Morse Poetry Prize, Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, A Field Guide to the Heavens won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, and his novel, Leaving Pico, won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. His poetry has been twice anthologized in Best American Poetry. He has also won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes Fascinating, provocative, intelligent collection of poetry that pulls no punches in its investigation of man, God, and all thoughts in between. —Thomas Fortenberry, American author, editor, reviewer, and publisher. Owner of Mind Fire Press and the international literary arts journal Mindfire, he has judged many literary contests, including The Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction.