Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota)

Оглавление

Zachary Welter Czaia. Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota)

Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota)

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Flesh is Funny

Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota)

Charon the Boatman Writes a Poem

Memories of Father X

Why I Won’t Publish Father X’s Name, Though the Newspapers Do

Father X and I Get Lunch

What I Am Most Angry About

I Don’t Want to Die Yet

Some Morning

john chapter thirteen verse eight

Memory From My Year of Substitute Teaching in Minneapolis Public

Mr. Karma

For An Old Student

Wisdom

Yes, Blake

God the Father:

The Blades of Grass in the Garden of Gethsemane Speak to Me

Moses:

If Dante Were Alive Today

Forgiveness

When the Priest at Sunday Mass

The Bone Thugs-n-Harmony YouTube Your Student Requested

Jonah:

Peter Remembers the Cleansing of the Temple

For My Younger Brother, On the Occasion of His Wedding

Another Metaphor Saint Paul Might Have Used for the Body of Christ

Friday Night Lights

Cadence

What Marcus Borg’s Video Camera Might Have Seen If He’d Been Filming in Jerusalem in the Days Following the Death of the Jewish Peasant Jesus

Sucker

Simon Peter’s Wife, on the Rabbi Jesus:

What is Snow

You and Me, Auden, in a Dream Together

I Write to Myself From the Future

Processional after Chris Abani

Magic

The People of God

Poem for My Father

Benque, 2005

Отрывок из книги

“Zach Czaia lays this first collection of poems as one would psalms on the altar of the world. Like a tattoo artist, he etches fine ink cuts onto our thinned skin, leaving memories that cannot be erased. Czaia takes us from classroom to church seamlessly in an American voice, in a Catholic voice, tracking both his personal history and pointing us from what we know to what we sanctify. His ‘Father X’ poems join a genre of indictment against those—named, nameless, and name withheld—who abuse sacred trust, leaving scars on human dignity and on the body of Christ. Have faith in these poems. They have a destination. Follow the bright notes of the trumpet. You will not be disappointed.”

—Rose Marie Berger poetry editor, Sojourners magazine

.....

—Rosemary Winslow poet, author of Green Bodies

“Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) is unusual for a first book in its range of subject matter as well as its emotional range. The book is also ambitious in the best sense of that word; it is not afraid to take on the ways in which the world can betray us. It is timely in its concerns and timeless in its longings for love, for beauty, for forgiveness and, most of all, for grace. Zach Czaia finds that grace through the act of writing poems and in language itself. The poet says about one of the characters in a poem: ‘That is the way with words for him now,/they are like that, small means of grace.’ Czaia could, of course, have written this about himself. And we, his readers, are able to experience that same grace ourselves thanks to these courageous poems.”

.....