Litany of Flights

“Litany of Flights turns its gaze to the natural world and to the heightened sacramental reality with which, as Hopkins puts it, all the created order is charged. At every turn, these mysteries are grounded in the sensory details of the world we apprehend, tree, sun, and star, squirrel and deer, fruit and flower, hawk and dove.” —Sally Thomas, author of Motherland
 
“Hogan’s collection is lush with rivers, moonlight, and flowers. It is also sharp with scrub brush, lightning, and flame. Like the Scripture she draws from, her poems both comfort and unsettle with fierce imagery: ‘You wait for me to discover your love among the leaves and thorns...I join/your written roses in swaying dance, in blood-red bloom of belonging.’ Her poems are an invitation directly into the heart of this swaying dance. This is a debut that will draw you into wonder without letting go.” —Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place 
 
“Combines the rich language of Gerard Manley Hopkins with the fierce passion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to become a twenty-first-century singer of the ancient Song of Songs. A new, loving, musical voice that you will want to hear and incorporate into your prayers.” —Paul J. Willis, author of Deer at Twilight: Poems from the North Cascades
 
“Some poets say their poems are borne in them; some believe poems come through: that the writer is merely the vessel. Such poets often take less credit for that voice of which they are the vehicle. These are the poets who give thanks and who praise. They come straight out of the mystical tradition, locked in a dance with the music and lyricism of St. Francis, Hopkins, St. John of the Cross, Herbert, Rumi, and Kabir. Laura Reece Hogan adds her name to this tradition in Litany of Flights. She is a true poet, and this is a sensational debut.” —David Keplinger, author of The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems
 
“Hogan never yearns to escape this world, or the hurt and pain of living in it—rather her poems yearn to enter the world ever more deeply. What links them is their posture of prayer: the work of paring away what is nonessential in the speaker until, hollowed, like the bones of birds, she is light enough for flight.” —Robert Cording, author of Walking with Ruskin, and Professor Emeritus at College of the Holy Cross
 
“It is a rare privilege these days to dive into a poetry collection and find that the word that keeps reverberating in your ear is joy: from ‘vats of joy’ to ‘cascades of joy,’ from ‘living in joy’ to ‘the joy in spilling praise.’ Yet, joy does not come easy in Litany of Flights, for there are ‘clefts of night’ and ‘barren months,’ a church that burns, its cross ‘tumbling into the nave like a sparkler.’ Elsewhere, longing is a ‘grounded bird’ that ‘thrashes against metal.’ But the longing that animates this exquisite collection is for the One Who never fails, Who comes in cloud and burning bush, Who consumes and fulfills. And Laura Hogan knows this, viscerally. No wonder her poetry brims with joy; she knows what it is to be a creature in love with her Creator, thus able to offer—credibly—joy as the ‘full flower of love.’” —Sofia Starnes, former Virginia Poet Laureate, author of The Consequence of Moonlight