Cover art by Rosamond Purcell

Bruce speaks about his ninth book of poetry, Prayershreds, (Orison Books 2023). with Cathedral Arts poetry consultant Evan Craig Reardon. This video will be released on June 13 and a link will be sent by email to Cathedral Arts Blog subscribers.

This is a conversation about the limits of language in both poetry and prayer. The deep longing of the poet (such as one hears in the Psalms) takes shape in this exchange and carries the listener into Bruce’s process and beyond. The conversation concludes with Bruce reading three poems from Prayershreds.

Learn more about the poet and his work at his website or at poetryfoundation.org. Go to Orison Books to purchase a copy of Prayershreds. Support this and other projects of Cathedral Arts by making a donation.

Begun with poems conceived during quarantine and lockdown, Bruce says, “This book’s poems go groping everywhere seeking for union amidst all the paradoxes, ambiguities, mysteries of faith and language……I see the book as an attempt to make sense of our physicospiritual lives in the midst of so much that wants to tear our understanding and even our ‘little’ faiths into shreds.”

Bruce Beasley is a professor of English at Western Washington University and the author of nine collections of poems, including most recently Prayershreds (Orison Books, 2023). His books have won three national competitions: the Colorado Prize (selected by Charles Wright) for Summer Mystagogia; the Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for The Creation; and the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award for Lord Brain. 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 appears in Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, POETRY, Gettysburg Review, Yale Review, and many other journals.