The Work of Creation: Selected Prose

In The Work of Creation poet editor and translator Luke Hankins explores literature art aesthetics ethics religion and the life of the spirit in a number of genres including literary criticism meditations on art and aesthetics personal essays and interviews. Collected in this volume are pieces that have appeared in such places as Books & Culture Contemporary Poetry Review Image The Writers Chronicle and the American Public Media national radio program On Being. In his generous and illuminating volume of prose Hankins demonstrates how much of poetry and the maturation of our engagement with it rely upon a power to contain opposites. . . . [T]he book honors a radiance of doubt that eschews both easy ironies and dogmatic polemics. The subtext here is gratitude a love of work and a deepening summons to the complexity of art as bound to the complexity of our condition. A beautiful book. --Bruce Bond author of Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand This collection is tuned to the pitch of listening--listening with fine intelligence as Hankins explores the nuances of poetry culture and history: the soul. --Claire Bateman author of Leap and Scape Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems Weak Devotions and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). Hankins serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review and he is the founder and editor of Orison Books a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.