Books published by Saint Julian Press, Inc.

Song of the Republic is a mythical handbook of poetry about these United States and how they first arose in consciousness. The native awareness of our pre-Columbian and pre-Cartesian terrain, the terrible ordeals of human extinction and trafficking, the violence of civil contention, and the vast endurance and visionary efforts of millions of European and Asian migrants voyaging toward this land, have produced an American culture that is deeply imbued with the experience of terrific grief and yet it is one whose composition is profoundly feminine. In this book there is no male gaze, for the work is a feminist project; in its purest sense the male gaze only truly concerns situations where men are thinking about other men.

Poems by Melissa Studdard, written to accompany Christopher Theofanidis' The Conference of the Birds for String Quartet which traces the metaphoric journey of Attãr's - The Conference of the Birds.

MESSIAH, a post-modern bop through our culture set in diverse elements of the American landscape- from a Manhattan subway station, to mills of rural Louisiana, to the mean streets of Detroit, to the wilds of the American Northwest, to Yankee Stadium, to the hills of Bellaire - writes back to the Bible passages with which Handel composed his Messiah Oratorio without challenging their theological meaning but setting them, as most sacred art does, in the contemporary. Anne Babson's poetry isn't "churchy," but it is replete with passionate exhortation, delighting in Americans in their imperfections and calling for a subversive conspiracy of love and a new era of compassion. The book is set to a soundtrack of American music, where the rapture trumpet is blown by Louis Armstrong, where the angels sing in doo-wop chorus, and where Handel's "Chorus: Hallelujah" turns into a Southern Rock anthem. The work is about us and our needs, our playlist, our delights, and the possibility of radical forgiveness and a return to hope.

My impression of poetry from high school literature was one of intentionally obscured images, creating a coded language that I was meant to tease out at great length. Midway through life's journey, I spent years trying to write down my experiences of Church, but struggled to find the right form. Much as I aspired to a sweeping historical genre, my own efforts in that direction never came together. Something in the nature of the sacred eluded my grasp, and resisted my efforts to write in such an affirmative manner.With the encouragement of several friends and guides, I allowed interior practices, like centering prayer and dreamwork, to influence my writing. These practices help us to gently set aside the voice of the ego, to access inner sources of symbol, meaning, and connectedness. Not far along this path, I began to describe spiritual experience in a language appropriate to its mystery. To no one's surprise more than my own, that language is poetry!Many of these poems deal with themes of misunderstanding and alienation, especially on the part of those coping with physical or neurological difference. Reflection on the interconnected framework of spectrum traits - both strengths and challenges - has helped me to make sense of my journey, and also of the historical witness given by certain extraordinary people of faith. It may be that some autistic-seeming traits are hard to distinguish from attributes of persons who feel not-at-home between the seen and unseen worlds.Andrea Messineo Houston, August 2019

Horizon of the Dog Woman powerfully explores the strength of people, especially women, who struggle to find acceptance-in their bodies, in histories, in relationships, or in Indigeneity. These poems invoke the anxieties of outsiders, of those forced to reside in the liminal spaces of our society. Still, from these in-between places and too-often ignored perspectives, the speakers boldly proclaim their presence and their deep understanding of the systems complicit in their situations. The personas created in Horizon's poems refuse to be sidelined. Rather, they dig in and create new spaces, building up rather than being overcome.Largely set against the vast northern forests and deserted shorelines of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Horizon describes a landscape that, while sometimes frigid and harsh, also offers space for growth, solitude, and a kind of peace that exists outside the frameworks of "civilization." The poems in this collection recreate the Great Lakes region's deep northern woodlands, as well as its shorelines, borders, and ghost towns; it is in this liminal wilderness that Horizon's speakers most often find acceptance of place and self.Built on both the personal and the persona, this collection gives voice to the unvoiced throughout history and literature. From Leda of Greek mythology to a mid-20th Century female magician; from the "Radium Girls" to unspoken women in the classic poems of Kipling, Noyes, or Carroll; from Mohegan ancestors to Lake Superior, the characters in the persona poems speak boldly and against that which would silence them. Also invoking a more personal perspective, Horizon details the first steps by an Indigenous woman toward an exploration of her disconnected histories, cultures, and languages. As a member of a displaced group of Indigenous peoples, the author explores not only what it means to be displaced, but also "re-placed" into the homelands of another Indigenous culture. Drawing on both Brothertown/Mohegan and Anishinaabe language and traditions, Horizon begins to interrogate multicultural Indigenous spaces and bodies disrupted and complicated by settler colonialism. Here too, the narrators are asking where they fit in, sometimes demonstrating conviction, while at other times doubting, questioning, and leaving the reader without easy answers.At its heart, Horizon of the Dog Woman is about relationships. Yes, romantic relationships, both the hopeful and the toxic, but more so about relationships between mothers and daughters, women and their communities, people and their histories, between the body and the land. First and foremost, the relationship that underlies each of these is the relationship between the body and the self. The poems in Horizon return to the body over and over again, exploring, for example, the effects of society's expectations, unwanted pregnancy, sexual and emotional violence, as well as the healing effects of nature. The voices issuing from those battle-weary but tenacious bodies don't just speak; they demand to be heard.

In a time of cultural wars, social polarizations, fears, and the rise of nationalism, authoritarian ideologies and isolationists across the global there are questions we must ask ourselves as human beings. That is what this book does, as it also touches on the story of a generation who came before us. This is "The Greatest Generation" that lived through World War II and many of the veiled and evil -"isms" inflicted upon humankind in the 20th and now in the 21st century.The great American poet and 9th Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish wrote these verses in his seventh book of poetry, The Hamlet of A.MacLeish - published in 1928."We have learned the answers, all the answers It is the question that we do not know. We are not wise."As an ordained United Methodist minister for over fifty-five years, and practicing psychotherapist for over forty years, the Rev. Robert P. Starbuck never read the Bible in a literal way. It was always a quest, a quest which belongs to each of us, to ask the right questions. As a clergy, he saw the beloved Bible stories, readings, and lessons, as a way of wisdom. As a way of being and becoming; a way of renewal, redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, and spiritual enlightenment. And as a Christian minister and therapist, as an American, he was actively engaged in healing and repairing the world.He saw the Bible stories as something to be taught, cherished, and celebrated as sacred literature and scripture. Our beloved stories of the Bible are filled with allegories and metaphors, pointing humankind towards a higher truth and experience of the divine. A way that points us towards an intimate and eternal relationship with the divine that is ours to claim, a new being and a new creation. As a minister he believed in and administered the Holy Sacraments of the church. He believed in God as the Ultimate Divine Mystery, the "Real Presence" of Christ, and the Holy Spirit - the Love of God, actively at work within the world.He was able to live in this mystery, to accept it fully and completely, and came to realize early in his adult life what Jesus was ultimately teaching humankind. Not to judge others, but to love God, and others as yourself - the "Golden Rule" in many faiths. We find this in the two greatest commandments of Christ. Hear what our Lord Jesus saith: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 22:37-40 In his ministry, he urged people to embrace life, to live their lives in great spiritual abundance and fullness, without separation, wholly aware and completely open - alive with wonder. He believed in Jesus and the message and gift of God's love, of salvation and oneness within the Trinity. He saw these as higher mysteries that take us beyond all religions and all religious beliefs, faiths, symbols, words, and images. He imagined God as something more.He believed in the unity of God's Spirit, the Holy Spirit, unseen and invisible that is always waiting for us to claim the power of God's love and healing within our own lives. And he believed in the transforming power of God's love, God as love and Christ as God's love made manifest within the world. In the end, this work is an affirmation of his faith. Ron Starbuck, Executive Editor - Sain

Praise for BRING YOUR NIGHTS WITH YOU: New & Selected Poems, 1975-2015IT IS as if all of human experience, knowledge, and geography are encoded and distilled within this new double volume of poetry by Thomas Simmons, such is the tremendous conceptual, intellectual, and sonorous range of the work. The poet incorporates so much worldly perception and literature within these pages that it is as if the reader is being offered a vision of both human and unearthly existence at once.The drama of voice and also of diction magnify and amplify this literary magnificence, the mature work of a humanist whose learning and poetic ability extends beyond any specific personal moment, engaging with a thoroughly extensive mortal terrain. However, there exists an unseen sub-textual performative quality inside all of these poems which raises the words and lines off the page-within the mind of the reader-and which supply the language with an enigmatic non-verbal quality: simultaneous, immediate, and so profoundly finite. This uncanny pneuma is intrinsic to the worth of these two fine books.It is as if the poet is foretelling his own life, but in paradoxical retrospect, such is the vivacious and vital nature of consciousness at work in these lines. It is a distinction of writing and awareness, of both sadness and fascination, as thepoet's attention careers away from a world before grace towards an imperishable and indelible comprehension.The poet says, Among those I loved you were the first ... whose only choice was to prevent my ever reaching you; and then later, How to say good-bye when one has already gone? Such sentiments are the mysterious and contrary threads that run through the fabric of this wonderful poetry binding the emotions and material detail into one strong medium, a tissue of song whose mastery lies not only in the expression but in its even greater indication of what cannot be said. Such is the genius of knowing the unspeakable and yet being competent and compassionate enough to endure that terrific and necessary effort which art can only imply.--Kevin McGrath, Harvard University There's a deep, rumbling power to these poems, a kind of wild but tempered energy that comes only when you're lucky enough to encounter a poet capable ofweaving accessible narrative with vivid, well-crafted lyricism. There's humor, too,not to mention savage intelligence paired with refreshing humanity and political conscience. In short, Simmons has gifted us with a collection spilling over with my favorite breed of poems: the kind you can teach in a classroom, lounge with on a beach, or cling to in the waiting room of an E.R., confident that at the veryleast, you're in good company.--Michael Meyerhofer, author of What To Do If You're Buried Alive

Poetry - "This is the opposite of a sophomore slump. Like the latest subatomic experiments in above-the-speed-of-light velocity, for a fraction of a second, when the same particle is in two places at the same time, Dylan Krieger will be there and elsewhere."

Early on in this fine collection, an old dog "plunges her snout deep in the sloppy pocket / of the sensual present." So it is that the deep pockets of Daniel Thomas are tongued and explored again and again in generous poems of love and of longing, of grief and of guilt. - Paul J. Willis, author of Getting to Gardisky Lake

Schwartz's second collection of poems examines the legacy of trauma and abuse among a family of women-and the ability of women and girls to survive. At times searing in grief, in other moments patient and willing to accept, Schwartz questions the truth behind any survival, what it looks like for a girl to emerge from the bottom of any cenote, or a city's residents to move forward after a hundred-year flood. Call all thriving things illegal: / The magnolia tree, its roots, / That vast network of veins that feeds itself / And others like it in dry soil, / Pushes space through concrete sidewalks / To breathe ... Every tough, gnarled thing holding / Its own life in a fist of vitality is illegal. --from" Everything is Illegal," Nightbloom & Cenote

Praise for DHARMA RAIN"Watch your step," warns the speaker in "Vortices," one of the gripping poems in Terry Lucas's Dharma Rain. Good advice for approaching Lucas's second full-length collection, for in these poems, "everything enters you." From the grim realities of "The Arrival," "Horse Latitudes," and "A Short History of Baby Incubators" to the wry humor of "Science Fact or Fiction" (about the history of "Giving the finger") and the delicious wit of "Psalm '66" to an amazing series of poems placing John Calvin as a kid growing up in Texas in the '50s, the poems of Lucas's new book confront the mysteries of science, faith, and desire in exquisite forms, delicious language, and keen intelligence. - Wendy Barker In these ambitious, far-reaching poems, Terry Lucas alternates between his own spiritual agon, specifically his wrestling with Calvinistic ghosts in the persona of a boy named Calvin, and his eclectic, lyrical investigations of such subjects as wild dogs, the spirit, Tassajara, the New Mexico desert, becoming a poet, survivors of barrel descents over Niagara Falls, and a short history of baby incubators. In his fresh new visions of the world stripped of its former fashions, ideologies, and mythologies, Lucas writes as if he's observing the world for the first time on his own heuristic terms in both dexterously formal and free verse. The result is a bold, often iconoclastic chronicle of a poet who "one day...just left / the stains in the whorls of his fingertips, the taste / on his tongue, and went home forever / to the work that had called him from birth." - Chard deNiord

PRAISE for THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT BEING AN EPISCOPALIAN Ron Starbuck is poet who has taken to heart and soul the teaching in Psalm 46, 'Be still and know that I am God.' Spoken in the voice of a deep listener, who seeks to embrace all souls in the Mystery of God's Love, who seeks to heal the breach. These poems are ecumenical both in that they are unifying and in the etymological root of the word, which is derived from the Greek word for house. Here is poetry that beautifully and prayerfully makes of the world a home where all of us may dwell.~ Aliki Barnstone, University of MissouriRon Starbuck has written a work of extraordinary vision and prophecy; this is a book of both profound reverence and a song of contemporary liturgy. It is a masterpiece that will transform the belief and devotion of all who experience these lines, either verbally or literally. Without doubt, this is a great work for the new Twenty-First Century.~ Kevin McGrath, Harvard University

Thomas Simmons' collected poems are a burning-a wild search of blue flame, the kind with the least oxygen but the most heat, a kind that levels a landscape built on a range of religion, myth, philosophy, erotic intimacy-and aims to rebuild it with the act of looking at it with clear eyes.From the shut-in child who says, "I began to calculate the area … of my life" and "how much I had, in inches, millimeters, feet," to the reveling in the grown body's hidden ecstasies and "the rightness of the body in its rightful place," Simmons' poetry contains a watchfulness that is complicated by its own act of watching. It is a watchfulness aware of its failings, which vacillates from an undistracted mission-such as Muhammed who, with the "tunnel vision" of religious fervor, only sees "out of the corner of his eye, the child Ayesha uncupping her hands and lifting the butterflies aloft"-to the full acknowledgement that any understanding comes beyond language, like the father and the child who take a wordless walk in the snow and discover "it had been enough, the sound / Of boots in the snow, the quiet, the sudden sun, Her hand in his."Simmons examines how human experience is best understood with tools outside of language, outside the relentless pursuit of assigning sign to signifier. There he says, we can find among the wreckage, "the beauty of it: my own circular ruins." For it is the not "hard words that we train for" but its subsequent weighty silences, the aftermath, and after reading it, one is left haunted and unsettled by images-such as the child shaking in his loft bed during a hurricane busily loosening the rafters of his house-images that silence our chatter-filled mind as we recognize it, unfailingly, as ourselves. --Leslie Contreras Schwartz, author of Fuego and Nightbloom & Cenote