Kirjahaku

Winner of the 2012 CSU Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by Nick Flynn.

American Purgatory is a story of the working class, a dystopia set in a near-future United States marked by severe drought, herbicidal warfare, and a totalitarian climate of poverty. This purgatory is populated by those who believe if that they work hard enough, they will be set free. Against this backdrop, three unlikely characters begin a journey that will take them away from work, belief, and even each other, until the protagonist uncovers the truth about this place and the people in it—a truth that indeed sets her free. Equal parts Dante and Cormac McCarthy, American Purgatory is a coming-of-age for capitalism written in the decade of tea-party terror.

“The earth / the earth / the earth / said” In Erase Genesis, critically-acclaimed Kentucky poet and translator Rebecca Gayle Howell transforms the KJV creation story for the climate change age. Devoted to the same three chapters, Howell’s erasures raise a new myth—a story of the Earth’s intimacy with us. Here, man is not given dominion. Instead, the trees and the waters keep eternity, and the Lord Woman seeds tenderness as the only way forward. A book-length poem with its roots in art, ecopoetry, progressive spirituality, and literary translation—Erase Genesis dismantles centuries of hurt as we bare our beginning anew, in abundance with Earth’s divine call: “Be light and / let be”