Theophobia - Beasley, Bruce

Bruce Beasley is the author of six collections of poems, most recently The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007). His previous collection, Lord Brain, an extended meditation on neuroscience, cosmology, theology, and language, won the University of Georgia Press' Contemporary Poetry Series Award and was published in 2005. Beasley won the 1996 Colorado Prize for Poetry in 1996 for Summer Mystagogia, selected by Charles Wright, and the 1994 Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for The Creation. Wesleyan University Press published his books Spirituals (1988) and Signs and Abominations (2000). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust of Washington and three Pushcart Prizes in poetry. His work also appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize, as well as other anthologies including Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries; Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets; Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary Poets from 1951-1977; and American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets. His poems appear widely in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, New American Writing, Field, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

ONE
Pilgrim's Deviations 1 1
Having Read the Holy Spirit's Wikipedia 2
Year's End Paradoxography 6


TWO
Pilgrim's Deviations 2 11
All Saints 12
The Kingdom of God Is Not Usher'd in
with Pomp and Exclamations 13
Sunrise Insomnia Service 15
Stray Apostrophes 17
Reading the Not-Written 20


THREE
Pilgrim's Deviations 3 22
Valedictions 23
Theme and Invariants 27
The Scale by which the Mapped Concerns
the Map 29


FOUR
Pilgrim's Deviations 4 31
Genomic Vanitas:
Vanitas 32
Vocation 33
Void Domicils 34
Mother Tongue 35
Like Begets Unlike 36
Nothing to Obstruct 37
Memento Vivi 38
Canticle of the Creatures 39
Reading about Retrotransposons
in Amish Country, in the Fall 41


FIVE
Pilgrim's Deviations 5 43
May I Tell You, Mr. President, About the
Sacred Chickens 44
Dysinaugural 47


SIX
Pilgrim's Deviations 6 52
Self-Portrait in Ink 53
Behold, I Am Against the Prophets, Saith
The Lord, Who with Sweet Tongues
Say, 'the Lord Saith' 54
The Parable of the Mustard Seed 56
Dedication 58
Like Unto a Merchant Man Seeking Goodly
Pearls 59
As in a Dim Scriptorium 62
Extremophilic Magnificat 64



SEVEN
Pilgrim's Deviations 7 69
Six Notes toward the End 70
To Revoke All Wills and Codicils Heretofore
Made by Me 72

NOTES As if the exegesis could ever cease 85