Customer Reviews

Glean

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It's common to write that a poet's debut book is one of the best first books one has ever read. This volume, though, is simply one of the best books of poetry, first, second, or third, that I have ever read.

I am a great admirer of Paul Celan, and this is the only work in English I have read that I find at all comparable, in its fractured, fractious, hopeless devotions and its addresses to an impossible and inaccessible "you" who is both lover and god. It's a powerful, moving, and beautifully written book.

With its intensity and whole-hearted commitment, verbal and emotional, and its dedication to a beauty no less genuine for its difficulty, this book particularly stands out in a contemporary American poetic landscape dominated by blank irony and pastiche. I highly recommend it.

Winner of the 2005 Nightboat Poetry Prize, Glean (the title refers to the gathering of grain after harvest) is an anthology of free verse (sometimes so free-verse that the words are chaotically arranged) poems by Missouri native and journal-published poet Joshua Kryah. The sparse verses explore the question: how can faith persist, when prayer can fail to elicit a response? When an absence is all we may ever glimpse of the divine, what is the true meaning of spirituality, and when does it become more real than that which it pursues? A thoughtfully contemplative examination of the great mysteries of life and faith, Glean is highly recommended for slow and careful deliberation. "Liminal (your voice so terribly human, its distance): Charged, the despotic fire banks. // (It was told to.) // Ash arches even further, its single shadow / listless, pre-determined. // Summoned by the great cloud, its remains scattered / in every direction, I stand neither here nor there. // The interminable space, the unbeliever. // Tell me to breathe.