Title: Naming Rites
Author: Gary Boelhower
Release Date: May 16th 2017
Genre: Poetry
BLURB Gary Boelhower’s third collection of poems explores the ways we are named and branded with multiple identities, a clay vessel molded and imprinted from the inside and the outside by those who know us or think they do, by wounds, worries, stones, and nicknames, by place and absence, by teachers and traitors. Boelhower dares to name the body’s blows and pleasures and how they are celebrated in solitude and connection. His language soars with ecstasy and burrows into hidden places in the soul. His lyrics tell how the world’s pain lodges in the cells and how the fragrance of summer stars opens an aperture to healing. Boelhower is winner of the Foley Prize from America and the Midwest Book Award for his second collection Marrow, Muscle, Flight.
Find Naming Rites on Goodreads
Reviews
Naming Rites is such a generous collection it
offers both blessings and confessions, dirt and bread, miracles and explosions,
cruelty and mercy, great blue herons who resemble monks and blue jays clowning
around, a lover's tender touch and the horrors of the nightly news. In second
grade, Gary Boelhower admits, he won 'the glow-in-the-dark statue of Mary,' and
his religious drive, now mature, is still alive in these poems. They aim for
(and often achieve) not just a personal record but transubstantiation,
transforming experience into wisdom, fear into freedom, language into song. Naming Rites is the autobiography of a
soul, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the self. Bart Sutter, author of Cow Calls
in Dalarna and Chester Creek Ravine:
Haiku
Gary
Boelhower's poems resist convention and confinement even as they speak deeply
of and from history, family, and community. The persona names and narrates
himself into being as he chronicles profound and tender encounters as well as
'tectonic shifts and betrayals.' Software engineers meditate, children go
hungry, and faith is lost and reconfigured. 'Let me not forget to be what I
have spoken,' Boelhower reminds himself and his readers. Naming Rites is an important and sustaining book for our times,
with its 'cadence that calls us into the streets with voices/of protest and
hope.' Julie Gard, author of Home Studies
EXCERPT
IN THE SILENCE
footsteps
crunch on the cold snow
heaven’s
full of falling mercy
the big
arms of the pine
spread in
prayer shawled in white
the whole
everyday machine muffled
if
everyone could say their name
in such
silence we might hear
each one
might send their small swirl
of hopes
and prayers
spiraling
out like sufi robes
in the
dervish dance
and we
might all
hear each
other’s hands rise up
and we
would know the one world’s song
all our
rituals are attempts at listening
all our
songs a preparation
for
emptiness when our words
have all
fallen away because we know
we are
all whirling together
wherever
you are however you do it
notice
how we are all whirling together
in the
great round dance
on this
tiny rock with fire in its soul
through
the grand galaxies
spinning
with mercy and wonder
Author Bio
Gary Boelhower’s poetry has been published in many anthologies and journals. His second collection of poems published in 2011, Marrow, Muscle, Flight won the Midwest Book Award. He was awarded the Foley Prize in poetry from America magazine
in 2012 and a career development grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts
Council in 2010. His recent nonfiction books include Choose Wisely: Practical Insights from Spiritual Traditions, and Mountain 10: Climbing the Labyrinth Within,(co-authored with Joe Miguez and Tricia Pearce). His third collection of poems, Naming Rites, was published in April by
Holy Cow! Press. Gary teaches courses in spirituality, ethics and
leadership at The College of St. Scholastica where he is a professor in
the Theology and Religious Studies Department.
GIVEAWAY: WIN a copy of Naming Rites and Marrow, Muscle, Flight by Gary Boelhower
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Thank you so much for featuring the tour xx
ReplyDelete