Psalms for Skeptics

Sparked by phrases from the book of Psalms, these poems question and occasionally affirm our everyday ideas about life, mortality, the afterlife, God, family, and belief. In vigorous contemporary language--complaining, lamenting, and wisecracking on everything from Job's wife to baseball, crows to angels, circus elephants to Mary Magdalene--but in traditional form, these sonnets, or little songs, ""speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."" ""Kent Gramm's Psalms for Skeptics is a lively, agile response to the traditional book of psalms, a response that opposes the psalmist's belief in a divine order to his own earthbound perspective. Irreverant and subversive, they nevertheless regard the views they question as imposing enough to deserve a passionate reply. However disbelieving they are, they are too witty and wide-ranging to be strident, ready to move from personal experience into politics and cosmology. They truly rise to the occasion."" --Carl Dennis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, Buffalo, NY Kent Gramm teaches at Gettysburg College and is the author of The Prayer of Jesus, November, Somebody's Darling, Gettysburg, and the novel Clare. He is a winner of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize.