Contemporary Catholic Poetry

Featuring 23 contemporary Catholic poets, from Julia Alvarez and Carolyn Forche to Timothy Murphy and Franz Wright, this anthology is an essential collection that captures the spectrum of the Catholic experience.

Editors Ryan Wilson and April Lindner have collected the work of Catholic poets born in 1950 and afterward. Featuring diverse styles, aesthetics, and forms, this selection demonstrates “the myriad ways the Church has left its mark on the imaginations of these notable contemporary poets.” A treasury of vibrant beauty–this collection explores the personal, practical, and political, of faith, nature, life, and lament–a welcome gift to all lovers of poetry and language.

“Poems represent the world and the people who inhabit it: they introduce us to plants, animals, human characters, and highly specific places. They show us striking images that may be familiar to us or entirely eldritch, tell us about experiences that might be akin to our own or quite different from our own. They delight us, seduce us, inspire us, instruct us, mock us, condemn us, console us, and mourn us. They challenge us, protest against us, and, sometimes, they baffle us. They celebrate the glories of the created world and its people, and they commemorate momentous occasions; they also curse the cruelty and the horror of the world and its people, and they lament catastrophes. They imagine other people’s lives and other worlds. They invoke deities and absences. They also speak intimately of heartfelt truths, describe local haunts, and address ordinary people directly. They meditate on living, on dying, and on the passage of time. They tell us stories, they tell us lies, and they tell us stories that reveal the truth through lying, to paraphrase the great painter Pablo Picasso. They enchant us with beauty and appall us with terror. Above all, poems remember. Each poem is, on a fundamental level, an act of remembrance, a kind of handprint pressed against the wall of Time.”–from the Preface of Contemporary Catholic Poetry