House World Heaven

Poet Edward A. Dougherty begins a spiritual journey in House, World, Heaven and shows us the landscape of contemporary small-town America. In the darkness of a winter morning, he delivers "the day's cold news" - the grind of poverty, the wreckage of human relationships, the loneliness of hidden suffering. "So much anger. Resentment," he writes, citing Saint Augustine, "is a metal poker fired red-hot in the heart, / To scorch another you must first wound yourself." Yet the same poem offers a radically different dawning: "in her beautiful hands / my love took oranges, sliced them / to reveal their sectioned dawns." The poem asks us, "What is it you need to begin healing?"

-Bart White, author, The Art of Restoration and Your Session is About to Time Out