Having demonstrated his skill as a storyteller in the celebrated novel Infinite Regress, Joshua Hren incorporates this aptitude for narrative in a sequence of strong and vivid poems in the tradition of Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and J.V. Cunningham. This collection surveys the loves and losses of late modern men and woman in all their degradation and beauty. Unblinkingly, Hren details scenes, stories, images, and metaphors that revisit and reveal the final end which many have forgotten. With a keen sense of metrical rhythm and narrative pacing, Hren imagines a litany for the lost: Aeneas washed up on the shores of Seattle, the sacrificial love of parents sorely tested, a near-divorced couple stirred to reconciliation, the immanentizing pressures of urban life, the sting of loss brought by degraded language, and the suppression of a supernatural vision. By turns heavy and healing, Last Things, First Things, and Other Lost Causes reaches for the weight of glory—a weight that lightens our burdens in the time that remains.
“From the clay-cool banks of Puget Sound to the Virgin’s warm embrace, this collection of poems offers insight and brings delight. The mending words of Joshua Hren tickle our word-shaped fancy and testify to truths eternal.” —R.R. Reno editor of First Things and author of Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society
“”In these poems, a world out of sync with its own divine symmetries devours its young, abandons its old, spills blood in its holy places. Still, in these ruins of faith, life, and love, for those who have eyes to see, ‘The Universe/ the art of God,/ is one long verse,/ is one loud laud.’” – Sally Thomas, author of Motherland
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Joshua Hren