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The Devotional Poems book cover
The Devotional Poems
2013
First Published
4.53
Average Rating
80
Number of Pages

Joe Hall is a devout poet. He is devoted to trailer parks, the drafty inner spaces of domesticity where we cry out for our lady help. He finds god, saints, saviors, in spiders in a woodpile. For Hall, poetry cannot hold anything if it doesn’t break. Here, god is amputated from the ground, and the ground is opening its devouring mouth. The Devotional Poems is a prayer—a prayer by evangelical AM radio, oxycodone addiction, white pines, and the death of everything the body knows through sickness. A prayer written while walking along a state road and down into a ravine day after day. These poems ask to be your sustaining and poisonous vegetation. Pay your devotion here. Cover art adapted from Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz' "Awake, Sleeper." http://alyssapheobus.com/drawings Praise for The Devotional Poems: “The world is constantly being ripped limb from limb in these poems, teeming as we are with beasts and bees and phantoms and hermaphrodites and dudes. Devoted, yes, to terror, but true too to the gorgeous black underbelly of how we’re all at once somehow together possessed. Joe Hall breeds electricity to breathe by again and again. He eats and regurgitates an unblinking, brilliant, sacred eye.” —Blake Butler “This is a book with a basic religion, which shifts and turns its shade upon looking, drawing its colors from The Book of Revelation as much as from the kinder spirit books. It is a sacred text where Hall becomes the ‘singing corpse,’ not ‘dragged across this landscape,’ but instead the singing thing dancing across the hills and valley.” —Dorothea Lasky “Hall’s devotions uncover ‘in the derelict warehouse’s silence’ a worldly utopia grown fat on the carcasses of lifeless heavens: ‘This is where I stick my head in the liquid / fire of the sun and piss myself while / burning vistas multiply.’” —J. Michael Martinez

Avg Rating
4.53
Number of Ratings
64
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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Author

Joe Hall
Joe Hall
Author · 5 books

Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, including Someone's Utopia (2018) and Fugue & Strike (forthcoming). His poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Postcolonial Studies, Peach Mag, terrain.org, PEN America Blog, Poetry Northwest, Ethel Zine, Gulf Coast, Best Buds! Collective, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center. http://www.blackocean.org/hall/

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