Luke Hankins – författare

In Weak Devotions, his first poetry collection, Luke Hankins engages with great honesty the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in the spiritual life. Far from seeking mere "e;self-expression,"e; Hankins has honed these explorations into tightly knit meditations and monologues that will resonate with the deepest questions and longings of readers of all backgrounds.

In The Work of Creation, poet, editor, and translator Luke Hankins explores literature, art, aesthetics, ethics, religion, and the life of the spirit in a number of genres, including literary criticism, meditations on art and aesthetics, personal essays, and interviews. Collected in this volume are pieces that have appeared in such places as Books & Culture, Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, The Writer's Chronicle, and the American Public Media national radio program "e;On Being."e;

Breaking into Blossom gathers modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem: endings that crescendo and exhort, double back or taper down, those that reverse expectation, embody paradox, or enact their logic in their formal DNA. In their introductory craft essay, co-editors Luke Hankins and Nomi Stone grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment. Finding fracturing points in their own conversation while considering the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different kinds of endings, the editors consider such questions as the value of epiphany, what kinds of endings might be likelier to be commodified, how the poem and the mind keep going beyond the page, and more. Hankins and Stone also offer a taxonomy of ending types to think with. This groundbreaking anthology includes poems about mystery, love, dread, cruelty, violence and war; poems of motherhood; of disability; of masculinity; of queerness; of baldness. Poems of transforming bodies and Black joy and failure and hope. The poems sometimes break into blossom; other times, they just break. Or they leave us in wonderment with their quiet buds unfolding into the world.

Poems of Devotion is a collection of the finest recent poems in the devotional mode, which the editor examines in detail in the introductory essay. The seventy-seven poets collected here demonstrate the ongoing vitality of poetry as a spiritual practice, in the long tradition of poets, psalmists, and mystics from the East and West. This is an anthology that will prove deeply rewarding in the classroom, at home, or in the library of your religious institution.

In his second poetry collection, Luke Hankins continues to engage profound questions of being and the nature of human experience in the aftermath of a break with the fundamentalist religion of his upbringing. Big ideas are not considered off-limits in these poems, yet the poems remain grounded in daily life and language. From theological and philosophical inquiries, to spare meditations on moments of sensory intensity, the poems in Radiant Obstacles are both wide-ranging and finely honed.