Belle Point Press

Maker of Heaven &

Name: Maker of Heaven &
Brand: Belle Point Press
Price: 15.95 USD
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Maker of Heaven &, by Jason Myers

This debut collection explores the implications of how we might experience the Imago Dei in the midst of a culture fraught with racism, violence, and the simple limits of our human frailty. Throughout, Jason Myers clings to a “hope-glutted” belief that all things may be made holy despite their capacity for destruction. Martin Luther King and Billie Holiday rest alongside Charles Darwin and Anthony Bourdain in these poems of prayer. Whether drawing from the Bible, the blues, or the natural world, Myers’ prophetic voice leads us down a path that can find wonder in the wreckage buzzing all around us and stirring within our own souls.

Jason Myers serves as editor-in-chief of EcoTheo Review and co-director of EcoTheo Collective. A National Poetry Series finalist, he lives with his family on the lands of the Coahuiltecan peoples and is a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. This is his first collection of poems. A Place for the Genuine: Reflections on Nature, Poetry, and Vocation will be published by Eerdmans in 2024.

Praise for Maker of Heaven &:

“These poems seek the name inside each living thing, the song inside the song, the story inside the story, and a belonging deeper than race, gender, class, and even species. When Jason Myers’ vision penetrates the body and finds the laws that manifest the body, when he sees through our human history, recent and ancient, and discovers older imperatives at war and in harmony, the reader feels sometimes troubled by his hard-won revelations of human nature, consistently surprised by the courage, the understanding, and the beauty of his process, and finally grateful for having been granted such sight.”

—Li-Young Lee, Winner of the William Carlos
Williams Award

“The poems in Jason Myers’ debut collection, Maker of Heaven &, at once grasp at and let go, approach and surrender, engaging the very gestures of the religious life, carving the path of the seeker. Vast, they contain multitudes: ‘What is all around me, the past, the air, the lone pear on a tree in need of company, I absorb, & what is within me spools out into the day . . . like breath, like a song.’ These are praise songs from a true believer, a priest, and they meet our precarious moment and transcend, cracking meaning out of experience and rending blessings from everyday life.”

—Carrie Fountain, Former Poet Laureate of Texas

"Maker of Heaven & is a book of wonder, and in it Jason Myers suggests that what we wonder can indeed be made into art as God must have felt wonder when making the cosmos: 'There was a secret / name inside every living thing, / a song underneath every song.' Each of these poems seems rooted in a belief in 'brutal brotherly love.' These poems are a testament to a poet’s faith in the word."

—Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

"An inspired theological dictionary, a Great American Songbook, an Eden in its own way, Myers’ collection confesses both our inherent connectedness and the countless ways we deny it. Myers always writes toward reclamation while keeping his senses sharp, chronicling the many, many people, places and things which make life worth living."

—Aarik Danielsen