All Soul Parts Returned

by Bruce Beasley

Overview

When the Gnostic Gospels collide with new age spiritualism, the Oxford Happiness Test, and treatises on Buddhist practice, we know we're in the territory of a Bruce Beasley collection. Alternately devout and heretical, Beasley—known for his intense and continuing soul-quest through previous award-winning books—interrogates the absurdities, psychic violence, and spiritual condition of twenty-first century America with despair, philosophic intelligence, and piercing humor.

Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Theophobia (BOA, 2012). The winner of numerous literary awards and fellowships, he lives in Bellingham, WA, where he is a professor of English at Western Washington University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683452
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Series:	American Poets Continuum
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bruce Beasley is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, including Theophobia (BOA, 2012). He is the winner of the Colorado Prize in Poetry (selected by Charles Wright) for Summer Mystagogia (1996), the Ohio State UniversityPress/Journal Award for The Creation (1994), and the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Award competition for Lord Brain (2005). He has won three Pushcart Prizes, and his work appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust of Washington. A native of Macon, Georgia, he lives in Bellingham, Washington, where he is a professor of English at Western Washington University.

Table of Contents

The Parts

Torn-to-Pieces-Hood

Part I Thou Must Leave

Report to the Provost on the Progress of My Leave 1

Me Meaneth 4

Reading Jesus Again, with a New Prescription 9


Part II Disorientation Psalm

Tohu Bohu 13

Looking Down the Cliff, with Schopenhauer, on Black Friday 16
The Last Good 19

“I Don’t Like My Soul Parts” 21

Reading The Purpose Driven Life, with Schopenhauer 22



Part III Hymeneal

Nuptial Song 26

On Marriage 29

Antithalamion 30

What Do You Think the Poet Is Trying to Say? 33

The Name of the Island Was Marriage 35

Offspring Insprung 39


Part IV The Sixth Dust

Revised Catechism 43

Cleft for Me Let Me Hide Myself from Thee 45

Such and Such and Such and Such 47


Part V The Mass of the Ordinary

Kyrie 51

Embolism 54

Sanctus 57

Credo 58

Fraction Rite 60

Agnus Dei 63

Benedictus 65

Gloria 68


NONORDINARY TO THE POEMS 70

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“All Soul Parts Returned is a dynamic catechism-in-progress, laden with prayers, addresses, and meditations on God’s ‘pouring-apart of opposites.’ Bruce Beasley reminds us that to ‘come apart’ or ‘go missing’ is not necessarily to be lost, and his lyrics struggle movingly with limitation and loss, with familial bonds and inheritance, and with the way we can neither fully hide in nor emerge from our vocabularies. The prismatic language of these poems shimmers with a love of ‘the inchoation of words’: ‘Out of the ordinary something keeps/busting loose…’ These poems gather, return, and enlarge it.” —Mary Szybist, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

Editorial Reviews

All Soul Parts Returned is a dynamic catechism-in-progress, laden with prayers, addresses, and meditations on God’s ‘pouring-apart of opposites.’ Bruce Beasley reminds us that to ‘come apart’ or ‘go missing’ is not necessarily to be lost, and his lyrics struggle movingly with limitation and loss, with familial bonds and inheritance, and with the way we can neither fully hide in nor emerge from our vocabularies. The prismatic language of these poems shimmers with a love of ‘the inchoation of words’: ‘Out of the ordinary something keeps/busting loose…’ These poems gather, return, and enlarge it.” —Mary Szybist, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

From the Publisher