Description

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Featuring 23 contemporary Catholic poets, from Julia Alvarez and Carolyn Forché to Timothy Murphy and Franz Wright, this anthology is an essential collection that captures the spectrum of the Catholic experience. 

 

Editors Ryan Wilson and April Lindner have collected the work of Catholic poets born in 1950 and afterward. Featuring diverse styles, aesthetics, and forms, this selection demonstrates “the myriad ways the Church has left its mark on the imaginations of these notable contemporary poets.” A treasury of vibrant beauty—this collection explores the personal, practical, and political, of faith, nature, life, and lament—a welcome gift to all lovers of poetry and language. 

 

"Poems represent the world and the people who inhabit it: they introduce us to plants, animals, human characters, and highly specific places. They show us striking images that may be familiar to us or entirely eldritch, tell us about experiences that might be akin to our own or quite different from our own. They delight us, seduce us, inspire us, instruct us, mock us, condemn us, console us, and mourn us. They challenge us, protest against us, and, sometimes, they baffle us. They celebrate the glories of the created world and its people, and they commemorate momentous occasions; they also curse the cruelty and the horror of the world and its people, and they lament catastrophes. They imagine other people’s lives and other worlds. They invoke deities and absences. They also speak intimately of heartfelt truths, describe local haunts, and address ordinary people directly. They meditate on living, on dying, and on the passage of time. They tell us stories, they tell us lies, and they tell us stories that reveal the truth through lying, to paraphrase the great painter Pablo Picasso. They enchant us with beauty and appall us with terror. Above all, poems remember. Each poem is, on a fundamental level, an act of remembrance, a kind of handprint pressed against the wall of Time."—from the Preface of Contemporary Catholic Poetry

About the Author

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April Lindner was raised in the suburbs near Long Island’s south shore. When she was in her early teens, the family moved to New Hampshire, and she graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where she studied under the poets Charles Simic and Mekeel McBride. After graduation, Lindner worked as an Editor for Clinical Affairs at Boston University Medical Center before moving back to New York, where she earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. After completing this degree, Lindner worked as an Editorial assistant at Cambridge University Press, taught English at The Ursuline School in New Rochelle, and spent time as a stay-at-home mother. In 1998 she graduated with a PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati.
Lindner is the author of two collections of poetry. Skin (2002) won the prestigious Walt McDonald First Book Prize, and This Bed Our Bodies Shaped (2012) was runner-up for the Able Muse Book Prize. Her poems, described by Denise Duhamel as “tender and fierce, startling in their excavations,” frequently address the submerged tensions and joys of domestic life. Subtle in both its vision and its musicality, her poetry explores childhood, erotic desire, motherhood, and religious experience with equal aplomb. Quietly epiphanic, Lindner’s best poems offer, as Thomas Lux writes, “collisions between vulnerability and unflinching looks at our human condition, its truths and contradictions.” Lindner also writes young adult fiction. Her three young adult novels—Jane, Catherine, and Love, Lucy—are retellings of classic British novels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and A Room with a View, respectively.  She has edited and co-edited several poetry anthologies, including Contemporary American Poetry, co-edited with R. S. Gwynn, and Líneas conectadas, a bilingual anthology of contemporary American poets translated into Spanish for a Mexican audience.
Currently, Lindner is a professor at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia’s Jesuit university. On a school-sponsored Ignatian Pilgrimage to Northern Spain and Rome, Lindner was moved to return to the Catholic faith of her early childhood, and subsequently enrolled in an RCIA program, getting confirmed at age 48. The mother of two adult sons, Lindner lives in Stockton, New Jersey, with her husband and three rescue dogs.
 

Praise For…

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Bravo! This is a remarkable introduction not only to contemporary Catholic poetry, but to poetry in general. The poems are carefully chosen, consistently powerful, and truly catholic in their range. The introductions are engaging and useful. Rare is the book that's ideal as either a gift or a textbook. This one is.
—Mike Aquilina, chairman of the board, International Poetry Forum, and author of Rhymes' Reasons
 
What an extraordinary collection of poets have been brought together here by April Lindner and Ryan Wilson in this profoundly moving panoply of twenty-three American voices covering the past five decades, each in their way paying homage to the deep spiritual and existential concerns that haunt us all. Read it, friends, page by page by page, soak it all up and take in the music and pathos and beauty of what real poetry has to offer us.
—Paul Mariani, author of Deaths and Transfigurations, The Mystery of It All, and All That Will be New
 
This is the definitive anthology of contemporary Catholic poetry in America and an important contribution to American letters more broadly. While deserving celebration among Catholic readers, the poets represented here merit much broader recognition. The wonderful poems in this anthology will delight, challenge, and move anyone interested in poetry.
—Lee Oser, Professor of English, College of the Holy Cross; Immediate Past President, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
 
"Selective, startling, judiciously arranged—Contemporary Catholic Poetry is quite simply a gift to lovers of poetry, whatever their religious beliefs." 
—Micah Mattix, Poetry Editor, First Things, Professor of English, Regent University, and Co-editor of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology
 

This anthology should be a standard assignment in every Catholic school in the English-speaking world.  From Julia Alvarez and Dana Gioia to James Matthew Wilson and David Yezzi, we have the most superb verse by poets eager to speak of human affairs through a Catholic lens that takes in the full range of despair, doubt, joy, love, uncertainty, death, and faith.  "I conjure the perfect Easter," one of them writes, "I am the Angel with the Broken Wing," says another, and "Nightly angst, ennui, and gloom / Refine the human need for some perfection," says still another.  These are thoughts given in eloquent words that young Catholics should injest throughout their high school career.  So, let's go, diocese superintendents: you now have a tool to make English a thoroughly Catholic experience. Use it.
—Mark Baurelin, editor at First Things, and author of The Dumbest Generation Grows Up
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