The anthology spans the first ten years of the poetry series at Paraclete Press. Included are poems by Phyllis Tickle, Scott Cairns, Paul Mariani, Anna Kamienska, Fr. John-Julian, SAID, Bonnie Thurston, Greg Miller, William Woolfitt, Rami Shapiro, Thomas Lynch, Paul Quenon, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

After 60 years at Gethsemani Abbey, Br. Paul follows up his recent memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, with a poetic collection that shows how to do just that - by writing poetry. Amounting to Nothing is both practical and metaphysical, a puzzling over the ultimate things of life, and a descending on the Benedictine ladder of humility to the earthly creatures surrounding a Kentucky monastery. This is less an exploration in self-knowledge than a forgetting of self in the wonders of everything. Quenon treads bare footed on the margins of mortality and immortality, with wit, thought, and hope.

From the time she was a child in Toronto, celebrated poet Luci Shaw has sent Advent greetings to her friends and family with a carefully crafted original poem. What began as a simple childhood exercise has now become a beloved annual tradition. Though a number of these poems have appeared elsewhere, Accompanied by Angels gathers all of them for the first time into a collection for all readers for any season of the year.Beginning with the joy, terror, and wonder of the annunciation, Shaw leads the reader on a poetic journey through the birth, life, and death of Jesus the Christ, culminating in the joyous and unexpected wonder of his resurrection. Her subjects run from the mundane to the sublime, from birds in flight and waiting old men to fiery angels and storm-ravaged ridges.

First published in hardcover as Love’s Immensity, this powerful book of selections from the mystics East and West, rendered into poetry, is now available in paperback for the first time.

The Chance of Home Somewhere there must be where no one wonders whether you belong... So begins the title poem of this remarkable collection from a popular poet and scholar of mysticism. These poems remind us that "home" shapes us, not as a particular place; home is a way of being in this world, for us and for the creatures with whom we share it. It finds expression in the inner light that carries us through dark seasons and in what inspires us to risk life in the face of death. Home comes to us in the unexpected glimpses we sometimes have of a wholeness resonant enough to hold us amid fragments. Many of these poems come from a long looking at the familiar and the ordinary, a patient listening for traces of a beauty that might still save us--in the rhythms of a street musician plying his trade in a Lisbon subway, the radiance of birdsong interrupting the night's last hour, and the tolling of an old temple bell that "still sings in the silences." They ponder the resilience that lies at the heart of the natural world, as well as in our desire to thrive amid the distractions that pressure us in our lives. In an over-saturated age like ours, they invite us to linger at the edges of silence, and wonder what it means that we are not made for reason alone, but "for what song can bring of solace and delight."

Learning about the ancient Jewish tradition of midrash, a rabbinic form of textual interpretation that seeks and imagines answers to unanswerable questions, felt to Amy Bornman like a poetic invitation to re-engage with the Bible in a new way. There is a Future: A Year of Daily Midrash – an award-winner in the Paraclete Poetry Prize competition – grew from a yearlong project to read the Bible daily, and write daily midrashic poems in response to the readings—to honor the text by wondering about, and struggling with, it. By engaging particular passages of scripture across the Old and New Testaments directly, these poems imagine new dimensions of the text, and make vivid connections to the world as it is now and to the author’s own life—emerging at year’s end with new hope in a future that at times feels impossible, as the days pile on days and the text’s enduring questions continue to ring.

"The poems gathered here span the last three decades of Levertov's life, their subjects ranging from Vietnam to the death-squads of El Salvador to the first Gulf War." -- Back cover. -- Provided by publisher.