What Will Soon Take Place is an imaginative journey through the book of Revelation. It offers a poet’s view of the prophetic, not in the sense of seeking out clues to the “end times,” but a means of taking this strange, fantastic book of scripture and letting it read its way into personal lives. This is not prophecy as foretelling, but forth-telling: telling us the truths of our lives in the light of God’s light. But rather than escape into some safe, heavenly realm, the poems return to our homes and meet us in the form of our neighbors, persecuted believers, and in shopping malls with vivid, edged-up language and the authority to believe and doubt at once.
Product Preview
| Format: | Paperback book |
|---|---|
| Product code: | PP8579 |
| Dimensions: | 5½" x 8½" |
| Length: | 96 pages |
| Publisher: |
Paraclete Press
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| ISBN: | 9781612618579 |
| 1-2 copies | $18.48 each |
|---|---|
| 3-9 copies | $17.64 each |
| 10-49 copies | $16.80 each |
| 50-99 copies | $16.38 each |
| 100+ copies | $15.75 each |
Praise
It is upon this hope that these poems are focused—on the hope expressed in the most ordinary life as well as the thin and clinging hope in desolation. In these poems you will find fear and trepidation, grandeur, failure and folly, and the hope that infuses it all. They speak of everything from a relationship with nature to wondering how a victim of abuse will find a way to trust in the hope of a loving God returning to earth to save her from her abuser.
Runyan’s work fits readily into the mode of the new poetry, with its zingy diction and the fizz of pop-culture references (Facebook, NASA, My Little Pony). . . Here, her inspiration is no less than the Book of Revelation, which is itself a vision of what will take place. She follows that disturbing prophesy almost chapter by chapter, populating its archaic strangeness with the anxieties and rot of our world, including a swearing Jesus, filth, desire, and vomit. Runyan is at her best at her darkest and wittiest, as in the poem, “The Great Harlot Takes a Selfie,” whom “software won’t block,” or the final piece, “Coming Soon,” which re-creates the New Eden as “backspacing into a garden/ before serpents unspooled from trees,/ before I positioned ficus leaves/ around my hips.” VERDICT Paraclete has done itself proud with their two finest poets to date, the direct and heartbreaking Wallace and the acerbic, accomplished Runyan.
Author
Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” was released in 2014. A companion volume, How to Write a Poem, is now available. When not writing, Tania tutors high school students, plays fiddle and mandolin, and gets lost in her Midwestern garden.
