Days and Times. Paul K. Hooker

These poems seek to be playful with faith. Their aim is to expose the underlying sacredness of events that form the liturgy of living and to do so with sensitivity toward mystery, wonder, and occasionally suspicion. Some of them seek to tell stories left untold by the narratives of faith; others prod the narratives of ordinary life to see where faith may be hiding. These poems do not understand faith as an intellectual choice but rather as an involuntary trust in something beyond us, something always unclear, ill-lit, and inadequately characterized by the language religious people use to describe ultimate realities. They seek not so much to dismantle that language as to subvert its self-assuredness, to find words that surprise and compel different ways of seeing.