The Hanging God Is Here

Today, The Hanging God is out and for sale on amazon.com and through the publisher, Angelico Books.  This, my second full-length collection of poems, will, I hope, build upon the work in Some Permanent Things to carve out a place in contemporary poetry for serious formal integrity, powerful rhythms, and a stark but spiritual vision that asks us to see into the desperate life of things.  Of this new book, Rod Dreher writes,

To read The Hanging God is to experience the ordinary world transformed by sly artfulness into a place filled with mystery and meaning. James Matthew Wilson is a poet who works like a priest, rendering the elements of quotidian life—its sublime gifts and severe mercies alike—into bearers of sacramental grace. Wilson sees deeper than we do; and in these poems, with lucidity  both stark and humane, he reveals profundity hidden beneath everydayness.

The great poet, critic, and philosopher, Frederick Turner enthuses:

How good to be reading a grown-up poet! No virtue-signaling in this poetry, though it's full of the harshest, most violent and liberating moral wisdom. None of the croon of fashionable free verse, but instead, complex fractured metrical forms and crazy rhymes that distort language until it squirts out its real meaning. No pandering to the niceness of the poetic audience, but prophetic bluntness that breaks our expectations and makes them gash gold vermillion.

Dana Gioia's Forward to the volume is perhaps the most definitive statement on the place of my verse in contemporary letters that has yet been published and, I think, invites those with an interest in literature but perhaps a wariness before the over-abundance and obscurity of modern poetry into conversation, study, and delight.

Click on the book cover to learn more or buy your copy.

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