Böcker av Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

A new collection from the best and most prolific poets published in the Christian Century over the past twenty-five years.

"This collection of poems begins in the growing darkness of November, stretches through Advent and the seasons leading to Easter and to Pentecost, and ends in the budding light of the Scottish Orkney Islands, where the canonical hours measure time over centuries and where God broods over an austere and beautiful landscape. The measurement of time passing and returning, year after year, in the rhythms of the seasons and of the liturgical year, create the pace and the song. But in the biblical voices of Magdalene, Mary, Abel, and Eve, and in the grim historical and political realities of war and suffering, one also hears lament and finds the poet's clear-eyed gaze straight into life's challenges. Memory is at work here, too, in personal reminiscences and in theological reflection. As one philosopher has said, "All truth is God's truth." '--Publisher's website

""To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.""--Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and MannersDrowning in a river, the violent murder of a grandmother in the backwoods of Georgia, and the trans-genital display of a freak at a carnival show are all shocking literary devices used by Flannery O'Connnor, one of American literature's best pulp fiction writers. More than thirty-five years after her death, readers are still shocked by O'Connor's grotesque images. Dr. Jill Baumgaertner concentrates on O'Connor's use of emblems, those moments of sudden and horrid illumination when the sacred and the profane merge as sacrament. This readable volume is ideal for college students, O'Connor scholars, or those wishing to better understand southern gothic fiction.