Rennie McQuilkin is the Poet Laureate of Connecticut and the author of twelve earlier poetry collections. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. He has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He was granted a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Connecticut Center for the Book; and in 2010, his volume of new and selected poems, The Weathering, was awarded the Center's annual poetry prize under the aegis of the Library of Congress. For nine years he directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he co-founded at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. With his wife, the artist Sarah McQuilkin, he lives in Simsbury, CT, where he is the local poet laureate.
"This may be the most unusual and entertaining Lives of the Saints ever written. Rennie McQuilkin has composed a spirited set of short, often humorous biographies of energetic, eccentric men and women caught up in and confronting-whether in legend or fact-the toils of their own times, from the First Century A.D. to the present day. With the down-to-earth St. Francis as a kind of spiritual guide, the poet mixes the comic with the awful, the tender with the unimaginably violent, the sphere of articulated spirituality with the ferocity of the secular, political, historical world. Without any of the melodramatic signs of rapture, he can still communicate what is the signal mark of his collection-joy: joy residing in a plainspoken, gritty, close-to-home language, evoking like religious paintings of an earlier age the ordinary world the saints and their often extraordinary actions inhabited. Stories of these spirit-startling men and women are here translated into a modern, skeptical yet always affirming idiom. What I most enjoy as a reader is McQuilkin's own brand of sidelong piety that offers humor, irony, tenderness, and fellow feeling 'every blessèd day.' " - Eamon Grennan
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