Luke Hankins presents The Work of Creation at Malaprop’s Friday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m.
PRESS RELEASE:
The Work of Creation: Selected Prose, is now available.
The Work of Creation includes a number of genres–literary criticism; personal essays; meditations on art, aesthetics, and religion; and interviews–but the focus on the necessary engagement with both the rational mind and uncertainty and the unknown that our best literature, art, and religion enact unifies the various elements of the book. The Work of Creation includes pieces that originally appeared in such places as Books & Culture, Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, The Writer’s Chronicle, and the American Public Media national radio program “On Being.” (Plus it has an awesome painting by Remedios Varo on the cover!)
“This collection is tuned to the pitch of listening—listening with fine intelligence as Hankins explores the nuances of poetry, culture, and history: the soul.” –Claire Bateman, author of Leap and Scape
“In his generous and illuminating volume of prose, The Work of Creation, Luke Hankins demonstrates how much of poetry and the maturation of our engagement with it rely upon a power to contain opposites, particularly as they problematize our historical moment. With the wide-angle of a theorist and the jeweler’s monocle of a close reader, the author here sets out to revalidate and reposition the poet’s work as part of a more fundamental set of contemporary challenges: to seek the genuine in the fractured, divine union in uncertainty, magnanimity in despair—and thus to forge greater intimacies among aesthetics, ethics, and psychology. In praise of the devotional, the book honors a radiance of doubt that eschews both easy ironies and dogmatic polemics. The subtext here is gratitude, a love of work, and a deepening summons to the complexity of art as bound to the complexity of our condition. A beautiful book.” –Bruce Bond, author of Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand
The book is available from the publisher, and also through Indiebound, Amazon, and BarnesandNoble.com.
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