Poetry is exciting, but elusive to most. This is troublesome for Christians because the Bible, John Poch reminds us, is largely composed of poetical verse. In God's Poems, Poch re-introduces sacred text as purposefully poetic, and explains what that means and invites the reader to with this insight live more thoughtfully and beautifully. But that is not all. Poch as a well-established and regarded poet, turns his eye to contemporary poetry and vindicates its function in a "created and creative world." Today many have abandoned the genre as a wasteland of misguided voice that really has nothing to say. The poet is a truth-teller, and Poch as devoted writer, teacher, and believer sends out a renewed call to turn to verse as a means of seeing oneself as God's poeima, or poem (Letter to Ephesians). The depth of self-knowing relates directly to an aptitude to engage the category of poetry at some level. A tragic void is filled with Poch's effort to exhort the reader to patiently reconnect with poetry even though it has been hijacked by persons who want to be heard more than speak well. (This book is essential, therefore, for aspiring poets.) For faithful readers or those seeking to return, Poch is a place to begin to understand contemporary writers worth knowing and which poets of the past must remain with us. In Virgilian fashion, he can see the panorama behind him and that which lies immediately ahead and instills a recovered love of an eternal medium that will be restored to a state of coherency and enlightened perspective. If Poch has faith in poetry it is because poetry is indeed a source of faith. If Justin Martyr claimed that everything that is true belongs to Christians, Poch shows us that everyone who speaks truth is to some degree a poet. Even God with his revealed wisdom chooses poetry as medium par excellence. It is essential to know how poetry works. "Great poems that we consider literature give us what we never expected. They go beyond the usefulness of conveying a feeling and unveiling beauty; and they tell us who we are."

The Brazos River and the Rio Grande: what lies between are physical and cultural geographies stretching south from the Texas Hill Country to the border of Mexico, west across the Trans-Pecos, and up through Northern New Mexico into Colorado. Photographer Jerod Foster and poet John Poch praise and wonder along these varied waterways and across the landscapes they host. The result is communion-a synergy of imagery in story and story in imagery, finding unexpected form, depths, and meaning much as rivers themselves are honed in the pull of gravity and texture.

John Poch's newly curated collection, Gracious: Poems of the 21st Century South, spotlights both emerging and notable voices from this poetry-rich region. This book promises to be the best and most influential anthology of Southern poetry published in over thirty years. Gracious steers away from stereotypical mockingbird-and-magnolia verse and instead amplifies a variety of lyric voices covering a wide breadth of Southern experience. Bryan Giemza's timely introduction situates the anthology among the current discourse in Southern studies. Gracious features the work of some of our best-known poets alongside those who have just published their first books. In all, there are eighty-four poets included whose work moves both the heart and the intellect. Gracious is, in the end, a new poetic geography, a book that strives to define Southern poetry for a generation to come. It is a book intended not only for the classroom; it aims to capture the imaginations of readers of all ages and backgrounds.