Tag: Jamie Quatro
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#2 Heartlands Best Reads of 2018: Fire Sermon
I gotta say I’m really proud of the title I gave my review for this book: “Praying with Fire.” See what I did there? OK, don’t let my humor keep you from Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon. Your own sense of propriety and tolerance for carnal mysticism might put you off this novel, but to me it…
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Godsend and Our Capacity for God
“I lack the spiritual gene,” the New York Times’ Dwight Garner says in reviewing John Wray’s new book, Godsend: A Novel. “I can grow resentful of novels that lead me into a cave of superstition and wished ignorance and then seal the entrance.” Not that he didn’t like the novel. Garner, (perhaps the leading book…
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Burning from Beginning to End with Scott Cairns
It’s all here. Beginnings and endings. Heaven and hell. Divine intentions and bodily appetites. That’s what you get with the poet Scott Cairns. Look for the kitchen sink. I’m sure it’s in there, too. Recently I came back for a season to Philokalia: New & Selected Poems, Cairns’ 2002 collection. It’s as rich and evocative…
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Looking In on Lookout Mountain: A Review of I Want to Show You More
There’s a lot going on up on Lookout Mountain. The battle of Chickamauga is not really over. 89-year-old Eva Bock braves traffic to walk up Lula Lake Road to deliver snail mail to President Bush protesting the war. A mainline church takes Corbett Earnshaw’s abrupt confession of disbelief as a sign and demolishes their building…
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Praying with Fire: A Review of Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon
“Dear God: Can you forgive someone for an act they cannot repent of?” (26) So goes Maggie’s prayer journal in the aftermath of an affair in Jamie Quatro’s new novel, Fire Sermon. Maggie has committed to move on. Has cut off communication with the poet she spent one night with in Chicago. In one light,…
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