River, Amen

by Michael Garrigan

Overview

River, Amen reclaims religious rituals and resurrects them in the wilderness. What emerges is a deliberate dialogue with rivers, a celebrative creed for rewilding post-industrial landscapes. This immersive, restorative collection offers a new language for understanding our place in relation to the living world and a prophetic warning that we separate the physical and spiritual at our own peril. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956368475
Publisher:	Wayfarer Books
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	124
File size:	900 KB

About the Author

Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He loves exploring the riverlands with a fly rod and the Pennsylvania wilds with his wife, Jess, and their dog, Whitman. He enjoys watching water move over rocks and feels strongly that every watershed should have a Poet Laureate. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence for The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and the recipient of the Shippensburg University's Outstanding Teacher Award. Michael is the author of multiple poetry collections including Robbing the Pillars, and his writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, Gray's Sporting Journal, River Teeth, The FlyFish Journal, Water~Stone Review, North American Review, and The Hopper Magazine. You can read more of his work at www.mgarrigan.com.

Editorial Reviews

"These poems pour and course, riffle, pool, and eddy. Garrigan is a poet alive to the mysteries of rivers, to dark days as well as light, to spirit and desire and human complication. 'We are, ' he writes, 'maps of each other.' Like a mountain creek, this book sings."

-Joe Wilkins, author of Thieve and When We Were Birds

"Like mountain streams coming together, Garrigan deftly braids the lenses of poet, prophet, and fisherman into a single singing thread. He props open the window of his practice, a practice of worshiping the world and the word, of casting out in search of 'the balance of being' on the water and on the page. The result is this 'reclamation song, ' a fierce, stirring, urgent, tender, visceral, much-needed book that calls like the voice in the wilderness, demanding that we save that which is still good, raw, and wild in our lives and in our selves."

-Corrie Williamson, author of The River Where You Forgot My Name

"Like a true convert of nature and member of the church of possibility, Michael Garrigan's poems remain poised and present for the next fecund turn of heart and mind that waits around the bend. River, Amen is a fine and faithful book, tracking what could connect us across 'shared syllables of existence.'"

-Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler and Revising the Storm

"Garrigan is one of the great ecopoets of his generation. His work is a fierce, poignant voice for all that is wild."

-L.M. Browning, author of To Lose the Madness

From the Publisher