In a Starred Review by Publishers Weekly this week, Bruce Beasley's newest collection Theophobia (now available at the BOA Bookstore) was highly praised, with claims that the book “outdoes his five prior collections with this spiky, thoughtful, elaborate, sometimes scary, sometimes funny set of verse essays, riffs, and meditations.”
Theophobia, the latest of Beasley's postmodern spiritual devotions, is structured around the poetry series, "Pilgrim's Deviations." PW notes that Beasley “wants answers, from divinity or from DNA, even if he believes that he will not get them, and so his variable, friable, unbalanced verse lines morph into prayer...”
Read the complete review here, and buy your own copy of Theophobia at the BOA Bookstore.oracle-supplicant, read
us & read us again
this accident, these vocables at the core.
Publishers Weekly announces that Beasley “outdoes his five prior collections with this spiky, thoughtful, elaborate, sometimes scary, sometimes funny set of verse essays, riffs, and meditations.”
Theophobia, the latest of Beasley’s postmodern spiritual devotions, is structured around the poetry series “Pilgrim’s Deviations.” On his quest for “how life comes to be,” Beasley consults a Christian creator-god, but also pop culture, and evolutionary and molecular biology; for our sake, he attempts translation. He plays at it.
We are told, however, that it’s not just play. Rather, Beasley “wants answers, from divinity or from DNA, even if he believes that he will not get them,"-- as do we, as do we-- "and so his variable, friable, unbalanced verse lines morph into prayer.” But the difference between us and Beasley, PW points out, is that he invokes the “ancient questions” with high linguistic sermon and command. “Collisions between curiosity and doubt… the oddest words he can find…the oddities of the life sciences,” these are Beasley’s “knives…at my fatlings’ throats.”
Read the rave review here, and get your copy of Theophobia at the BOA Bookstore.
from “Mother Tongue”
Theophobia (BOA, 2012)
