Author Description

A Wild God Teaches Us To Pray – [Un]Collected Meditations brings together Dane Cervine’s poetry and prose—both new & old—that celebrates the ecstatic. Heretofore unpublished in previous books, it takes inspiration from recent national literary trends that explore “language and the architectures of wonder, awe, and ecstasy” per one recent seminar. Offering “a new way to consider poetic practice alongside spiritual practice—or poetics as a spiritual practice.” Another seed was planted when the author paralleled his wife’s “Year to Live” contemplative process, where one imagines what priorities might surface in such a finite-time period. What emerged, besides an unequivocal desire to spend as much time as possible with family and loved ones, was to gather his more esoteric strays of the written word and herd them into pastures where they could be enjoyed together, or “at least gawked at with mild curiosity.” The poems in this collection range in tone from the likes of Rilke, Rumi, Kabir, to the slant-poetics and prose of Susan Howe, and experiments even stranger. Here, under one evangelical or circus tent (they are not dissimilar) are a gaggle of ecstatic words, both dark and light. As the author says, “If I were to die today, at least now these words can moo and bray and pray, together.”