The Devotional Poems

by Joe Hall

Joe Hall is a devout poet. He is devoted to trailer parks, the drafty inner spaces of domesticity where we cry out for our lady help. He finds god, saints, saviors, in spiders in a woodpile. For Hall, poetry cannot hold anything if it doesn’t break. Here, god is amputated from the ground, and the ground is opening its devouring mouth. The Devotional Poems is a prayer—a prayer by evangelical AM radio, oxycodone addiction, white pines, and the death of everything the body knows through sickness. A prayer written while walking along a state road and down into a ravine day after day. These poems ask to be your sustaining and poisonous vegetation. Pay your devotion here.

Cover art adapted from Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz' "Awake, Sleeper."
http://alyssapheobus.com/drawings

Praise for The Devotional Poems:

“The world is constantly being ripped limb from limb in these poems, teeming as we are with beasts and bees and phantoms and hermaphrodites and dudes. Devoted, yes, to terror, but true too to the gorgeous black underbelly of how we’re all at once somehow together possessed. Joe Hall breeds electricity to breathe by again and again. He eats and regurgitates an unblinking, brilliant, sacred eye.”
—Blake Butler

“This is a book with a basic religion, which shifts and turns its shade upon looking, drawing its colors from The Book of Revelation as much as from the kinder spirit books. It is a sacred text where Hall becomes the ‘singing corpse,’ not ‘dragged across this landscape,’ but instead the singing thing dancing across the hills and valley.”
—Dorothea Lasky

“Hall’s devotions uncover ‘in the derelict warehouse’s silence’ a worldly utopia grown fat on the carcasses of lifeless heavens: ‘This is where I stick my head in the liquid / fire of the sun and piss myself while / burning vistas multiply.’”
—J. Michael Martinez

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2013

About the author

Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, including Someone's Utopia (2018) and Fugue & Strike (forthcoming). His poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Postcolonial Studies, Peach Mag, terrain.org, PEN America Blog, Poetry Northwest, Ethel Zine, Gulf Coast, Best Buds! Collective, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He has taught poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers through Just Buffalo and the WNYCOSH Worker Center.

http://www.blackocean.org/hall/

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my book. I wrote it between 2007 & 2012. I like it just fine.

[Rion Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

If these poems were a person they'd beat the shit out of you and leave you in an alley broken, but crying for more. What I mean by this is that throughout the book the language is like a delightfully aggressive prayer. Joe Hall is damn good.

[Michael Flatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are trying to get closer to the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be. I like that.

[Sarah]

Make time for these poems: I've been admiring them for months and still find lines which startle, wallop, and bruise.

[Jamie Perez · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK. I just read this a second time and paced it a lot better this time around. I read it out loud a lot -- especially "Post-Nativity" and the first Exorcism poem. And there are some real quiet gems hiding in the last section that you might overlook after all the fury and fury of the earlier pieces.

This is a great book through and through -- and I don't even believe in the magic man in the sky.

---

I'm going to read this again in a few weeks -- I'm especially looking forward to spending some slow time with the last section (Devotional Poems)... After the frenetic intensity of many of the earlier sections, they are a whole different thing... Even quiet and tender at points.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Devotional Poems, Joe Hall carves his poems to resemble the visages of our most ancient forms: ritual, love, belief, prayer, language, history. These are the ghosts of our collective story, extended. And, ultimately, these are the mouths from which wails of ruptured faith escape. “How it is the stone dies”–it dies with the realization that neither religion nor traditional language has the capacity to encompass the essential violence of our times. Stone dies here; stone dies now.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visceral and intense, but, like the title says, almost religious.

Very cool little book with some very strange language and imagery.

My interview with Joe Hall at Monkeybicycle.

[J.A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the biblical structures and culled phrases here, though I also found myself drifting at times, due to a pace and rhythm I wasn't expecting or which was just hard to digest or follow. But Hall is clearly talented, that much is plain to see in this collection.

[Erin Lyndal Martin]

Not going to rate this book or give a review because I think it just wasn't my style; merely noting that I gave it a try.

[Edward Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very strange and dark. A mixture of religious imagery and a viscerally graphic collection of images of corruption and decay.But I liked it because it was clearly a state of mind of the poet.

[Cary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just can't let this one go. Consistently good. New things every time. My favorite book of 2013. Maybe the only book that should've ben published this year.

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

this one goes on the favorites shelf. joe hall fucking killed it. could not have been happier with the money spent on this one.

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt my insides turn through old stones and plastic memoirs spurred on by lines as old as they are infinite and new.

[Biscuits · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every person is their own church, own gospel, own wildchild preacher, fucked up and sprawling.

[Ryan Bollenbach]

Surprising and extreme, pining and supplicating, stubborn and driving--a meeting zone where the difference between the natural and unnatural is, almost literally, exploded. Post-nativity, the 2 exorcisms, and the "Our Lady of..." were my favorites, but those make up a lot of the book anyway. Highly recommended.