Matthew Minicucci

Part flesh, part spirit, partaking of both breath and death like all reliquaries, these poems traverse the Stations of the Cross in order to become, themselves, stations of the human lost—and found. Compelling in their voice, vision, and craft, Matthew Minicucci's poems seek nothing less than a kind of transubstantiation: "an incantation in the breath," a "simple song that waits and swells the tongue." This is a remarkable and moving debut.

Charles Wright said "Poems are both reliquary and transubstantiation, as our lives should be." Matthew Minicucci understands this, the way our language preserves the holy and the here-and-now, how the ecstatic and the everyday, brought together, transform us. Minicucci is a master of the meditative lyric. In his church, we learn to pray again.