In this book of poetry, Alex Mouw, MA ’20, PhD ’25, confronts religious devotion as something to grasp and something that seizes. Rooted in the landscape of West Michigan, his poems seek traces of the divine with keen attention to the natural world, science and personal history. Yet amid ordinary lives and crises of faith, revelation descends unexpectedly, talons extended in frightful welcome. This book offers readers the taste of belief, its texture, and the way its convicted sight both distorts and illuminates. By turns meditative, ecstatic and snarky, Mouw’s poems capture the sermons and lamentations, the preachers and seekers, the politics and piety of midwestern evangelical Christianity.
About the author
Mouw is an assistant professor of English at Samford University. His poetry and scholarship appear in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Twentieth-Century Literature and other venues.