Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining

Book excerpt: In his third collection, the award-winning author crafts poems that “reckon with the sins of history and the human-made scars on the natural world” (Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi). Winner of the 2016 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining explores the South and its history through the eyes of the living, the dead, and the inbetween. “The songs of Charles Wright, Rilke, and Blind Willie Johnson have tuned Wagenaar’s ear, but the music is his own, irresistibly so. Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining is a brave and difficult grappling, ending with the difficult joy of a child’s birth and the world’s subsequent remaking. This is, simply put, poetry that adds to the glory of the human endeavor.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling “In Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, there is a rapturous beauty that encompasses the American South, the United States, and the world, a poetic rooted in the space around the poet and extending outward to the world with questioning, compassion, grief, and hope.” —Afaa M. Weaver, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award “The speaker searches constantly for evidence of God’s presence in the world. It is a book of doubt just as much as it is a book of faith. Indeed, doubt threatens, at every line break, to wrest faith from the speaker’s hands. But books of doubt are books of faith, and Southern Tongues understands this.” —Los Angeles Review of Books