Driving the Beast
Poems
Christopher Bakken author Wyatt Prunty editor Leigh Anne Couch editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Louisiana State University Press
Published:10th Dec '25
£16.99
Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.
Driving the Beast is a book about movement. Christopher Bakken's poems shift between Greece and the American Midwest, tracking the restless nature of selfhood, while seeking glimpses of the sacred in landscapes scarred by history and political turmoil. The book's back-and-forth mirroring invites readers to confront their own reflections in moments of catastrophe and wonder, and to view them alongside those of immigrants and refugees.
"Driving the Beast is an epic pilgrimage through underworlds of myth and memory. From the legend-riven islands of Greece to the American heartland, Christopher Bakken confronts mortality, history, and the passage of time in poems as unsparing as they are luminous." - Jane Satterfield
"A theologian of sensuosity, a memoirist refusing nostalgia, a seer, Bakken offers us the shards of experience that somehow, almost, never quite, and yet still might put our broken world back together again." - Alan Michael Parker
"Driving the Beast offers an esoteric theology, one that trusts hunger as revelation, as nudge, as indicator of where the pilgrim ought to go and how the pilgrim might hope to proceed." - Scott Cairns
"Not surprising for a poet who has spent time interrogating the ancients and inhabiting the modern cities they bequeathed us, Bakken composes ritual songs that point past the surfaces of experience to what is both mysterious and essential." - David Yezzi
ISBN: 9780807184752
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 5mm
Weight: unknown
84 pages