Overview

The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey confronts religious devotion as something you grasp and something that seizes you. Rooted in the landscape of West Michigan, these poems seek traces of the divine with keen attention to the natural world, science, and personal history. Yet amid ordinary lives and crises of faith, revelation descends unexpectedly, talons extended in frightful welcome. This book offers readers the taste of belief, its texture, and the way its convicted sight both distorts and illuminates. By turns meditative, ecstatic, and snarky, Alex Mouw's poems capture the sermons and lamentations, the preachers and seekers, the politics and piety of midwestern evangelical Christianity.

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9781680034509

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Reviews

The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey bears witness to the manifold consequences of hunger and how it shapes our lives. In Alex Mouw's assiduous and ambitious debut collection, the pressure of hunger takes many shapes: restless faith, the body's intricate desires, and the mind's conflictual appetites for clarity and complexity. ""Who would I bother if not my God, each / complaint and spinning holler pointed where?"" begins the poem, ""Apology for Belief"" and I'm reminded that courage born of vulnerability is not so much a solution as it is crucial fuel to keep living, to keep going. These poems collage spiritual and bodily concerns through imagery born of Midwestern landscapes and mindscapes. They dwell in the tensions between wry humor, hurt, and something not quite akin to hope, where ""faith pool(s) . . . like blood in a bruise."" But I'm most impressed by how these poems balance wit and heart: Mouw's dynamic voice upends our expectations of what prayer can truly be. --Aaron Coleman, author of Red Wilderness and Threat Come Close --Aaron Coleman ""This isn't exactly a prayer,"" writes Alex Mouw at the start of this fine and theologically searching debut. In sonnets recalling Donne, Hopkins, Jarman, and Hill, Mouw wonders--in a world weighted down by suffering, how can we possibly pray? He concludes--as prey. In these poems, God is a hawk, a wolf, a dog with teeth bared; we are rabbits, voles, the smallest of the small. ""I was afraid,"" Mouw writes, ""and you baited me"" and ""So rarely do you have anything / to say that doesn't turn bloody."" And yet, the speaker of these poems also yearns for God's presence, complaining, ""I can't hold my need for you steady."" Rooting down into the question of theodicy with Jobean stamina, Mouw pivots from desire to fear to anger and back again with a theological nimbleness that reminds me of Dickinson. In a world where God is weaponized, where the default mode seems to be prideful shouting instead of humble seeking, we need Alex Mouw's doubting and urgent voice. It is refreshing to see religious poetry this devastatingly human--which is to say, this deeply incarnate. --Melissa Range, author of Scriptorium and Horse and Rider --Melissa Range Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alex Mouw is God-driven, God-riven, and obsessed with the sonnet, a form that haunts this book. He details his disgruntlement with God's creation. An aunt becomes suicidal. A one-year-old's ""trach tube, wider than a straw, wheezes."" Through it all, Mouw plays his own music, ""turns his favorite record up, the one // where the drummer beats the crash cymbal like / a captive who swears he doesn't know a thing."" God is that drummer whaling on the world's crash cymbal. But listen to this captive poet. One might think of his book as a sonnet where doubt and unbelief occupy its octave, but with a volta or turn to moments of illumination--at dusk, the ""surround- / sound drumming of bugs in every shadow tree."" Mouw makes music out of the divine dissonance that surrounds him. His music mesmerizes, even as it sometimes terrifies. --Donald Platt, author of Tender Voyeur and Swansdown --Donald Platt Poems that condemn a faith that failed the poet are legion. Poems that document a wrestling with the angel are rarer. Alex Mouw's The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey is a book of wrestling, not with faith so much as within faith, within the ideas we may or may not have about faith. In the tradition of Donne, these poems ascend and descend in an American idiom of hospital wards and Midwestern soybean fields, of Andy Warhol, NPR, and ASL. ""Any hurt can be providence / if you wait long enough,"" Mouw writes, and he means to excavate the quiet wonder inside this recognition, where wonder takes the form not of blame, but of the kernel inside a question. --G. C. Waldrep, author of The Opening Ritual and The Earliest Witnesses --G. C. Waldrep

Author Information

ALEX MOUW is an assistant professor of English at Samford University. His poetry and scholarship appear in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and other venues.

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