Bruce Beasley is author of six poetry collections, most recently The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems. His other collections have won awards such as the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, the 1996 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and the 1994 Ohio State University Press/Journal Award. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, and three Pushcart Prizes. (Author photo by Jim Beasley)
Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia is the latest volume in his ongoing spiritual meditation, which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. The book is structured around a series of poems called "Pilgrim’s Deviations" and it forms a deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley interrogates the theological, metaphysical, scientific, and political worlds of our time in a continually disrupted catechism, a "catechismus interruptus."
"Beasley is, above all, a poet of spiritual ardor ... He is a postmodern descendant of Herbert, Traherne, and Vaugh ... There are few contemporary poets who can keep such august company."
—David Wojahn
“Beasley outdoes his five prior collections with this spiky, thoughtful, elaborate, sometimes scary, sometimes funny set of verse essays, riffs, and meditations on the idea of a Christian creator-god, and on ideas from evolutionary and molecular biology about how life comes to be…"
—Publishers Weekly
BOA Editions
