Description
The poems in The Lord of Everywhere are about strength and courage and the will to hold on, about home and homelessness, and the tension that floats like Emily’s feather between knowing what home means and finding our true home. These poems praise those caught between glaciers of clarity and wildfires of cruelty, those who take that “new step,” which Dostoevsky called our greatest fear. These poems honor those who make their way home each day, together or alone, and who still believe, somehow, inexplicably, almost wordlessly, in love that endures, even in the flames.
Recognition
“Hodgen makes the ordinary and the plain profound again and again. We all struggle to come up with the words to attach to our grief, our confusion, our losses. Hodgen is not immune to the plight. You can feel and appreciate the effort. He wrestles each of the ingenious little masterpieces from the struggle and the search.”–Leslie Odom, Jr., author of Failing Up
“If you’re in need of a needle to drop onto the turntable of history, an instrument both delicate and diamond-sharp enough to trace the fossil record, the criminal record, the unbroken world record for stitching together “the earth and the words we were made from,” put your own doubtful fingers into the wounded grooves of this book, listen to them, press your ear right up against their speakers, imagine our own selves for a moment as attuned and as generous to one another’s lives as John Hodgen’s poems are to us.”–Henry Walters, author Field Guide: A Tempo
