Promotional Information

Brings works from Bruce Beasley's first four award-winning collections together with twenty-five new poems, organizing them around the metaphor that gives the book its title.

Table of Contents

INITIALS

from Spirituals (1988), The Creation (1994), and Summer Mystagogia

Witness

The Creation of Eve

Eve, Learning to Speak

Childhood

Indian Summer

Summer

The Instrument and Proper Corps of the Soule

At Easter

The Reliquary

Novice

The Cursing of the Fig Tree

Eurydice in Hades

Sweet Repeaters

Summer Mystagogia

Primavera

Ugly Ohio

Idaho Compline

Arcana Mundi

Advent: Snow Incantation

Doxology

The Monologue of the Signified

from A Mythic History of Alcoholism

After an Adoration

Sleeping in Santo Spirito

A Dogwood Tree in a Country Graveyard, at Easter

Ultrasound

Before Thanksgiving

Going Home to Georgia

The Conceiving

EXTREMITIES

from Signs and Abominations

What Did You Come to See

Negatives of O'Connor and Serrano

Hermetic Diary

Hermetic Self-Portrait

Mutating Villanelle

Errata Mystagogia

from Spiritual Alphabet in Midsummer

from The Mosntrum Fugue

MORTOGENESES

The Corpse Flower: New Poems (2006)

The Corpse Flower

Is

Not Light nor Life nor Love nor Nature nor Spirit nor Seblance

nor Anthing We Can Put into Words

And Go into the Street Which Is Called Straight

The Craps Hymnal

Lord's Prayer

Rotbox

Mortogenesis

The Vanishing Point

Acknowledgments

About the Poet

About the Author

Bruce Beasley is professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is the author of five previous books including Spirituals and Signs and Abominations. Among his awards and honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust, two Pushcart Prizes, the 1996 Colorado Prize (chosen by Charles Wright) for Summer Mystagogia, the Ohio State University Press / Journal Award for The Creation, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award from the University of Georgia Press for Lord Brain.On Summer Mystagogia

Reviews

"Bruce Beasley is not quite like anyone else, and his progress has been dazzling to follow, one of the most satisfying growths into a major poetic presence . . . I have witnessed. . . . [His] ability to transubstantiate pain and loss into spiritual wonder is not to be missed."
*Field*

"Bruce Beasley has crafted a piece of supreme symmetry. . . . Signs and Abominations is the present and future of poetic, theoretical thought; it is indeed the best road map yet for divining the mysterious relationship between the human and ethereal energies."
*Contemporary Poetry Review*

"Surprisingly moving and personal. . . . nuanced, playful, almost brutally frank, the early poems establish Beasley as a poet to be watched, and now the reader watches as they move-surely, inexorably-toward their metamorphosis. . . . A quick dip into the content reveals something else: an energy so compressed it is ready to spring forth, transforming itself in the process. Story and song and query and lung breathe at the core of these poems; they are exhaled— physically— as the (nearly) visible product of a mind ceaselessly roaming at the corridors of meaning, restlessly pacing the halls of experience, hacking away at convention and correlation, fiercely flying in the face of tradition. And to what end? To make, as he has, an amalgam of flesh and spirit, profanity and profundity, of such equal parts that it is impossible to distinguish the ordinary from the astonishing."
*Georgia Review*

"Startling, original . . . the monstrous and the divine flee from and chase one another throughout this fugal, challenging new book by one of our most stylistically and thematically intrepid young poets."
*Virginia Quarterly Review*

"In poem after poem in this book . . . the effect is stunning. [This] is an important first book by an extremely talented young poet, a gift to us all."
*Quarterly West*

"Spirituals is a book of apprenticeship in which one can see the potential for genius in the retelling of the old stories."
*Hudson Review*

"Bruce Beasley is a refreshingly physical poet. . . . [He] has a good ear, essential to a poet, and sometimes his music is superb, almost as good as Yeats. . . . Beasley transforms longing into the ground of faith itself."
*Books and Religion*