Dreams and Prayers Public Release
After years in the making, and more than a decade since the release of my first book, Dreams and Prayers: Verses from a Wandering Mind is finally available to the public, in print, on Kindle, and for other ebook readers.
My second poetry collection is much like the first: seventy-five poems (up from fifty-nine in A Year in Verse), most but not all blank verse, each paired with at least one public-domain drawing, woodcut, or illustration. But where A Year in Verse is organized based on the concurrent cycles of the year and thus places poems about spring, the Resurrection, and school graduation together, Dreams and Prayers is divided into three thematic sections:
Metaphors contains poems drawing imagery from nature, literature, history, and more. The title of the section was suggested by the inclusion of a couple of “Untitled Metaphors,” but every poem is built around at least one image of some sort.
Memory and Dreams contains what that title suggests: poems based on or inspired by moments that I can never forget, happy times that I wish I could never forget, and “strange and wonderful” dreams. (As I write in the preface, “There are dreams, and then there are dreams …”)
Finally, Higher Things consists of poems that turn to look upward, either about or addressed to God. This is the longest of the three sections, in part because it ends with my series of poems based on the “O Antiphons.”
The cover was designed by Hannah Linder; her prices are expensive for a “very small indie” author like me, but since she was basically able to “spin straw into gold” they were well worth it, and if I publish a third collection (or end up self-publishing any of my fiction) I plan to make her the first designer I consider for its cover.
Like A Year in Verse, Dreams and Prayers is also full of public-domain illustrations chosen to complement the poems. Readers of the paperback will, I hope, especially enjoy the way a few poems’ words and accompanying illustrations are arranged for even greater effect; my skill with the typesetting tools I use, and the features I’ve implemented in my poetry_ebook_utils toolkit, have significantly improved since Dreams and Prayers was released. (Unfortunately, such instances of hopefully-charming layout and typography cannot be included in an ebook, given the constraints of reflowable layouts for ebook readers.)
Take up and read, and explore the images and memories, dreams and prayers.
Dreams and Prayers is now available in print, on Kindle, and for other ebook readers.
