Glean

by Joshua Kryah

Joshua Kryah's Glean, a reference to the gathering of grain after harvest, explores the appalling trust implicit in any act of faith-that prayer may not elicit a response. Moving between doubt and vulnerability, the body and its unresolved spiritual fate, these poems dedicate themselves to the pursuit of redemption. "In these tight and resonant lyrics, logic, precision, and affection coalesce. Opening with the self as a winged fruit, Kryah goes on to find more and more facets of being that negotiate body, name, and world in a way that brings out both their reverence and their rigor. Like prayer that needs nothing to pray to, these poems continually open, enlarging our view"-Cole Swenson. Glean is the winner of the 2005 Nightboat Poetry Prize.

Genres: Poetry

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Joshua Kryah’s Glean won the 2005 Nightboat Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Verse, among other journals. He lives with his wife and two children in Las Vegas, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is also poetry editor for Witness.

Reviews

[Open Loop Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joshua Kryah’s poems slip easily off the contemporary tongue, and yet they would be as at home in the mouth of a monk in medieval France, a Brazilian missionary, the courtier to his beloved. Their art is shelter to the questions of a young father, a poet living in Las Vegas, who wonders whether language can do justice to man’s desire to know. What meaning lives in the pull of faith? Is there craft in longing? Is there reality in myth? Questions that come to the reader as voices twining like a pair of dancers: she, what is revered; he, what is from life:


the adored giving itself, unabashedly, over
to the adorer.

What I have only just begun to gather up
in my arms.

The stone rolled back.

Your body no longer.


The poet engages our most persistent doubts, our hopes, the range of our desires. Inspired by Saint Augustine, in the tradition of Dante, he presses onward, pursues the religious and transcends it, spilling in his wake a drizzle of words that slide slowly toward the well from which one draws meaning. These drops, colored by the spectrum of contemporary poetics, feature fractured lineation, words as if whispered, the working pause:


shape—

thou dismembered,

dismemberer.


~


Necessary, or else

said to be so, the damage

made all the more real by my thirst for it.


A reader interested in other then the seeker’s struggle toward the divine will find in these poems that which is decidedly human: the beauty and fragility of the body, life at the mercy of chance, resilience in the face of destruction. She will grapple with the speaker’s yearning, the speaker’s isolation, the way it mimics her own daily dip into company and drop back out again.

Joshua Kryah’s work is the lover who closes his eyes, believing, as he sinks into sleep, that ritual and solitary journey, his beloved will be beside him until “the coming of light.”

~Carlin M. Wragg, Editor
Open Loop Press

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems sing on the page, deeply lyric in nature and full of prayer quality. They fight with questions of faith and doubt, divine and ordinary. For me they are centered in the body and in a sense of language. And even though these are very smart poems, I still find them accessible. Excellent book. I couldn't put it down.

[Michael Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Green Hymn
...
the slow alluvial churn of wings
...

Perforate
...
Part real, part conjecture, we are about to become this ability to touch...To have drawn such luck from the beggar's bowl.

The Fever Chart
...
It is hard to seize what is.
Then I saw a landscape without me in it.
I cannot say with certainty that I saw nothing.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminds me, at times, of Eric Pankey's The Late Romances.

[clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

greater than great.

[Kelly D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea

I might’ve liked it better if I had understood the religious allusions