Thread by @fireinapasture

My first hard copies of LITANY WITH WINGS just arrived and my heart’s cracking open. It was one thing reading the proof PDFs (again and again while I worked with @andrewheiss to put the finishing touches on the collection). @BccPress

It’s very much another thing to hold the finished product in my hands—seeing the poems on the page, feeling the paper that holds ~sixteen years of my work. Hear those pages whirring? Like wings…

This collection is, in the end, a devotional book. It represents my wrestling w/God, religion, Mormon theology, language, faith, my roles as husband, father, son. It represents my ongoing faith de/reconstruction, my feeling after hope + healing + grace + the divine feminine.

It represents my perpetual reaching for newness of life, my still unfolding relationship with and hope-in words/the word. So, for me, it’s apropos that the collection released during Holy Week, when Christians reflect a little more on life, death, and renewal.

And it’s apropos that it released during #NationalPoetryMonth, when more people may turn to an art form I love than they might during other times of the year.

I hope readers of all faith/non-faith traditions and reading interests can find something meaningful in the book.

As much as I hope this, though, I’ll also admit that the book is deep down a love letter to Mormonism: the faith tradition that bred me and that I care about, despite an often strained relationship w/the institution, its leaders, their teachings, and the LDS community.

Thinking of this love, I’m reminded of a poem by Eugene England, the first Mormon poet I encountered in the pages of @dialoguejournal’s first volume:

THE FIREGIVER

God, forgive my pen its trespass,
And I forgive thee the sweet burning
That drives it on through thy dominion.

God, if what it might encompass,
If shapes of love, thy face, or being
Itself are challenged in its question,

Indulge the hand that ventures into flame,
Suffer my searching, for you share the blame.

England’s work revealed to me the potential for a Mormon literature—something I’ve since been seeking to realize in the Mormon literary community as poet and editor. I hope LITANY WITH WINGS would hold a place on his bookshelf (just like I hope it’ll find a place on yours).