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You don't have to be a skilled poet to see yourself living In a Strange Land. The poets found in this collection, however, not only recognize it, but express their varying experiences in ways that bring us along with them. We see their experiences--whether similar to our own or completely different--and find their poems ringing true in beautiful, painful, amusing, and fascinating ways. None of these ten poets has previously had a full-length poetry collection of their own--yet--but they are certainly all worthy of that honor. Keep an eye out for these poets in literary journals, chapbooks, and new books over the next while.Contributing poets: Ryan Apple, Susan Cowger, Jen Stewart Fueston, Laura Reece Hogan, Burl Horniachek, Miho Nonaka, Debbie Sawczak, Bill Stadick, James Tughan, Mary Willis

You don''t have to be a skilled poet to see yourself living In a Strange Land. The poets found in this collection, however, not only recognize it, but express their varying experiences in ways that bring us along with them. We see their experiences--whether similar to our own or completely different--and find their poems ringing true in beautiful, painful, amusing, and fascinating ways. None of these ten poets has previously had a full-length poetry collection of their own--yet--but they are certainly all worthy of that honor. Keep an eye out for these poets in literary journals, chapbooks, and new books over the next while.

There was a time in my youth when I would buy and read any and every book I discovered by C.S. Lewis. What I had found was that he wrote in a way that engaged my mind like no other writer. He was respected in a variety of fields, and held passionately to his faith in Christ. Years later, when I began rereading his books, I was surprised to find that many of the ideas I'd held as my own had been planted by Lewis.Each of the poems in Conspiracy of Light springs directly from something Lewis wrote, or from events in his life. The source for some will be obvious, even to casual readers of Lewis. The notes at the end of this book, although unnecessary for reading the poems, direct readers back to the source material. I would be pleased if my poems expand readers' appreciation of Lewis and bring them back to his work.November 22nd of this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis. His is a legacy that will continue to grow as the years pass. Here I honor him, and the one for whom he wrote.

About the Contributor(s):D.S. Martin is known internationally for his blog Kingdom Poets. His previous poetry collections include Poiema (2008), which was honored as a winner at the Word Awards, and a chapbook, So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed. His poems have appeared in such publications as Anglican Theological Review, The Christian Century, Convivium, Ruminate, Sehnsucht, and Sojourners. He lives in the Toronto area, where he edits the other collections in the Poiema Poetry Series.

The Turning Aside is about stepping out of our routines--like Moses turning from tending sheep, like a certain man selling his everything to buy a field--to take time to consider the ways of God in the company of some of the finest poets of our time. Turn aside with such established poets as Wendell Berry, Les Murray, Luci Shaw, Elizabeth Jennings, Richard Wilbur, Dana Gioia, and Christian Wiman--and respond to their invitation for us to muse along with them. Walk with poets from various parts of the planet, even though some of them are less known, whose words have been carefully crafted to encourage us in our turning aside. The Turning Aside is a collection of Christian poetry from dozens of the most spiritually insightful poetic voices of recent years. It is a book I have long dreamed of compiling, and it has grown beyond my mere imagining in its fulfillment.""D. S. Martin''s The Turning Aside offers a marvelous harvest of serious Christian poetry--an unusually rich and various representation of spiritual as well as poetic excellence. This is a treasury, a volume for the bedside table, there to be savored slowly--read as a prompt to meditation, prayer, and a deepened devotion to Scripture.""--David Lyle Jeffrey, FRSC, Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities, Baylor University ""I have been waiting for this collection for thirty years, literally. I am almost speechless. In this company of poets, lifters-of-the-veil between heaven and earth, I have no need for my own words. I only want to borrow theirs. And I shall--in worship, in church, in literary company. I am certain this magnificent collection will turn many aside from our mechanistic tromp through our days into the wondrous, piercing reality of God-with-us right here, right now.""--Leslie Leyland Fields, poet, speaker, and author of Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas""The Turning Aside is a spectacular collection bringing together under one roof the finest Christian poets of the age. Its pages provide awesome, inspiring, even mystical reading, with lines to linger over in meditation.""--Ron Hansen, author of The Kid""This collection brings together an expansive, idiosyncratic, and intriguing group of poets, some you''ll know well and others you''ll be thankful to discover. Their work forms a rich banquet that is often surprising and, in the end, supremely artful. The book has the power to (paraphrasing Tania Runyan) ''singe the edges of our silent lives.''"" --Daniel Bowman Jr., author of A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country; Editor-in-Chief of Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith; Associate Professor of English, Taylor UniversityD. S. Martin, the editor of this anthology and the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series, is a Canadian poet living in Brampton, Ontario. His collections include Poiema (Wipf & Stock, 2008) and Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis (Cascade, 2013), and one chapbook, So the Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (2007).

Broad in scope--theological, ecological, and personal--and acutely particular in details--witnessed and lived--the affecting poems in Particular Scandals explore how one endures suffering, avoiding the cliches of both bitterness and transcendence. Thus, while Moore''s poetry depicts the debilitating ruin illness wreaks, it also embraces the beauty and mystery in creation, in faith, even in tribulation itself. At the book''s core is pure paradox and insightful integration, wedding Christmas--Christ''s incarnation and eventual, willing sacrifice--to pain and grief. Thus, on the heels of Moore''s multiple surgeries and amid her husband''s serious heart problem--both while in their forties--come ""flashes of hallelujah"" and songs knit with Amens ""un- / broken, like a world without end."" Empathetic and observant, Moore''s evocative poems also turn their attention to friends'' and other family members'' appalling losses: a stillborn infant, suicidal adolescents, molested, and trafficked children. All in all, the book portrays how Moore survives like the Sycamore tree in one of her poems, ""scabbed and scarred from moments like this,"" offering her ""empty self / like a cup to the Lord of the storm.""""The scandal of this collection is it sizzles with such life, such particularity, such fierce pain and love, that you may not be able to put it down. Chatting about the weather, reflecting on ill health, estimating our chances of happiness, recounting adventures of a Labrador retriever and the astonishment of the incarnation, Julie Moore sounds as close as a friend. And yes, she is as trustworthy.""--Jeanne Murray Walker, author of New Tracks, Night Falling""These are poems that span our daily lives and ask the hard metaphysical and theological questions living brings. . . . They are alert (without sentimentality or false transcendence) to the grace and beauty, both ordinary and commonplace, that open our hearts and mouths in hallelujah. I so admire these poems that quietly refrain from false claims and extravagances, but patiently bring us--in their detailed evocations--closer to [our] paradoxical and mysterious lives.""--Robert Cording, author of Walking with Ruskin""What poetry can be made of [those] sufferings none of us want to live the first time around? Fine poetry, it turns out, that offers neither a romantic whitewash nor despairing doubt, but a series of beautiful particulars that offer clarity, beauty, and ''amens'' in the midst of a world unlikely to change. Readers will be freshly charged to see joy in the scandal of living.""--Leslie Leyland Fields, editor of The Spirit of Food""The poems of Julie Moore''s exhilarating collection, Particular Scandals, are poised ''on the primal edge / of wonder.'' Musical and observant, attentive to the ''mystery that envelops us,'' she glimpses the eternal in ordinary things, such as the birds she lovingly identifies, from vulture to white-breasted nuthatch. Even in a ''universe of pain,'' she discovers how to praise, as any real poet must.""--John Drury, author of Creating PoetryJulie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom (2010) and the chapbook Election Day (2006). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice and Best of the Net and has appeared both in anthologies and in publications like The Christian Century, The Missouri Review Online, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. She lives in Cedarville, Ohio, where she''s the Writing Center Director at Cedarville University.

In Second Sky, Runyan intertwines the life and writings of the Apostle Paul with the spiritual journey of a modern suburban woman confronting the broken world. Second Sky wrestles with the deeply personal challenges presented in Paul''s letters and experiences: putting on the new self, burying oneself with Christ, and counting all as loss while driving through snowstorms, reading horrific headlines, and bathing the family dog. These are not simple poems of religious inspiration; they are steely encounters with the living God. Runyan invites us to work out our salvation in rusted Cadillacs, operating rooms, and packs of wild coyotes. Meanwhile, Paul runs from the collapsing walls of his prison cell toward shipwrecks and vipers, meeting us on our own roads to Damascus, the earth breaking open to a second sky of faith.""While these poems are anchored by Paul''s familiar words, his directives and admonishments, Tania Runyan''s plucky responses challenge traditional pictures of the believer''s life. God''s grace appears in many guises in her poems--from a frisbee laid bare in the melting snow to a drive on icy roads with a carload of children. These are spirited and intimate pictures of a suburban woman''s encounter with holy mystery, often both unpredictable and oddly comforting.""--Jill Palaez Baumgaertner, Professor of English, Wheaton College""This is a remarkable book. The poems are brief posts about the fissures--cataclysms--emergencies in the daily life of a parent, a spouse, a friend. It was only after devouring the book that I went back to check on how each poem glosses a passage of Scripture. There are layers and layers here to uncover. I will discover them slowly, but meanwhile, I love the fierce brio of these poems. I love their intelligence and urgency.""--Jeanne Murray Walker, Professor of English, University of DelawareTania Runyan, an NEA fellow, is the author of A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which won the Book of the Year from the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals, including Poetry, Image, The Christian Century, Books & Culture, Mid-American Review, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. She lives with her family in northern Illinois.

Description:Written over five decades, these poems begin fixed in the human condition, our common experience of an imperfect world. Slowly, under the aegis of the Spirit, they move toward a brighter vision of things: they ask us to ""dream in that fecund darkness until all shapes are shining."" Poetry offers us an experience of union with the alarming and enthralling world we live in, as well as glimpses of what transcends it and is beyond language. It reminds us that all is connected and supports the hope that light will triumph. The author trusts that these poems may do the same as they explore the chain of being from animal to human, from serpent to angel--and that joy is the final dominant note.Endorsements:""Robert Siegel is one of my favorite poets, and I''m frustrated that so many readers are unfamiliar with him. This handsome ''new and selected'' volume is an ideal introduction to his work, and I may just resort to hawking it on street corners, like those ragamuffin kids peddling papers in old movies. You want the latest news? Read Within This Tree of Bones.""--John WilsonEditor, Books & Culture""Robert Siegel possesses the transformational power of a wizard. Whether he casts his eye on a pig or a night crawler, whether he is standing in falling rain or in a swath of sunlight, he can make the world seem more like itself. For forty years now his poetry has been clarifying the world for me. Bob''s new sonnets bring biblical subjects and landscapes into such intimate and vivid language that I will never again think of them in the same way. The things he writes about--as he says in ''The Annunciation''--grow ''more distinct, themselves / in a way beyond explaining.'' That seems to me to be a brilliant definition of what great poetry can do. It clarifies the world beyond any other kind of explanation. This book does that. It is filled with great poetry.""--Jeanne Murray WalkerProfessor of EnglishHead of Creative Writing, University of Delaware""Robert Siegel''s business is tracking whatever order, not chaos, obtains. He knows certainly ''the helpless dance out their fear'' as much as ''the divine tread fall[s] again and again.'' A cornucopia of wise songs, monologues, psalms, prayers, fables, sonnets, and more, Within This Tree of Bones is what I think a career book should be: ambitious, sonorous, eclectic, serious, joyful.""--David J Smith,Professor of Poetry,Johns Hopkins UniversityAbout the Contributor(s):ROBERT SIEGEL (1939-2012) is the author of ten books of poetry and fiction. His poetry includes A Pentecost of Finches, The Waters Under the Earth, In a Pig''s Eye, and The Beasts & the Elders. His poetry has won prizes and fellowships from Poetry, Prairie Schooner, America, the Friends of Literature, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His fiction includes the award-winning Whalesong trilogy. He has taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, Wheaton, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he was professor emeritus of English.

About the Contributor(s):Paul J. Willis is Professor of English at Westmont College and a former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. He has published two previous volumes of poetry, Visiting Home (2008) and Rosing from the Dead (2009), along with an essay collection, Bright Shoots of Everlastingness (2005), and a fantasy novel, The Alpine Tales (2010). Learn more about the author at pauljwillis.com.

Description:These poems--selected from the award-winning poet''s output over four decades--more explicitly than any of his prior volumes address the centrality of Christian vision to his aims and aspirations. Lea looks unflinchingly at all that may challenge his faith: the cruelties of both natural and human worlds, the attractions of jolly, good-hearted secularism, the distortions of doctrinaire religiosity, the seeming pointlessness of untimely deaths; but his faith in Christian redemption shines through even the bleakest of his poems.Endorsements:""The life in Sydney Lea''s poems is entirely local, whether the locale is Italy, Montana, or his home in Vermont . . . The making of the soul that occurs in Sydney Lea''s poems is intimately connected with the place where the making occurs . . . Sydney Lea''s poems show us that all spirituality is local spirituality. He is our preeminent poet of the soul''s making among local places and people.""--Mark Jarman Author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems ""Sydney Lea''s heartbreaking and heartening poems look, with the utmost honesty, at ''what we may or may not be / here on earth.'' . . . [These] urgent poems give us back the depth of our existence. With intelligence, passion, and humility, Lea embraces the task he has been given: to record those ''warming recollections'' of parents, friends, wife and children, and to acknowledge how this ''splendid universe subsumes . . . his small dumb witness'' into a ''hymn of grateful praise.''"" --Robert Cording Author of Walking with Ruskin""In this book Sydney Lea invites us to take a spiritual journey . . . By the end of Six Sundays, the narrator and the reader step together into radiant light. What is so moving about Six Sundays is not only its wrestling with spiritual questions, but also Lea''s affirmation that life is a spiritual journey and that this journey is of paramount importance.""--Jeanne Murray WalkerAuthor of A Deed to the Light""From his experience of doubt to his affirmation of the Mystery, the poet''s faith shows through honest and eloquent language . . . Lea''s unique gift of language opens up the most ordinary detail of village life in northern Vermont and raises it to universal significance. His compassionate gaze at suffering and loss is balanced by his embrace of nature in all its forms and by moments of ecstatic revelation.""--Robert Siegel Author of A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected PoemsAbout the Contributor(s):Sydney Lea lately retired after more than forty years of teaching at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at several European universities. Lea was a Pulitzer finalist for his volume of poems Pursuit of a Wound, and won the 1998 Poets'' Prize. He holds the doctorate in Comparative Literature from Yale. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Foundations, he founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review, one of the nation''s leading literary quarterlies. This is his tenth volume of poems; he is also author of a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness. He is currently the poet laureate of the state of Vermont.