Theophobia

âBeasley outdoes his five prior collections with this spiky, thoughtful, elaborate, sometimes scary, sometimes funny set of verse essays, riffs, and meditations on the idea of a Christian creator-god, and on ideas from evolutionary and molecular biology about how life comes to be⦠Yet it's never just play: he wants answers, from divinity or from DNA, even if he believes that he will not get them, and so his variable, friable, unbalanced verse lines can morph into prayer⦠Careful, sympathetic attention will produce pleasure in Beasley's collisions between curiosity and doubt, as the newest oddities of the life sciences, and the oddest words he can find, crash into dark fears and grapple with ancient questions.â
â"PUBLISHERS WEEKLY *Starred Review*

"An investigation into the physical world and what lies beyond, this book will appeal to enthusiasts of poetry and the subjects that Beasley mines." â"Library Journal

"This is a book that wrestles with religious forms as well as religious notions, considering religious practice and experience in relation to current-day concerns. This includes not only the putting of lines on paper, but also waiting for customer service or meditating on the grand design of the Toxoplasma gondii lifecycle⦠what sets Theophobia apartâ"as a thick, varied, and always thoughtful exerciseâ"is considering such a phenomena as a religious task, revealing of something essential to our understanding of God, as Augustine argued in relation to vipers and worms⦠Beasley casts a broad net, dredging deep in this important contemporary addition to poetic wrestling with the religious.ââ"Spencer Dew, Rain Taxi

"Beasley is, above all, a poet of spiritual ardor, a dyspeptic believer in the Geoffrey Hill mode ... Writing of Donne in a recent essay, Hill insists that for a certain breed of poet, style is faith, and Beasley may well be such a writer. His many allusions to the mystical esoteric â" Meister Eckart, Julian of Norwich, the Gnostic gospels, and the Corpus Hermeticim (not to mention plain old Bible verse) â" are evidence not merely of Beasleyâs learnedness, but also of his belief in the poem as a kind of heterodox spiritual exercise. He is a postmodern descendant of Herbert, Traherne, and Vaughn ⦠there are few contemporary poets who can keep such august company ⦠Like Robert Duncan, who was also powerfully drawn to Gnostic and Hermetic thought, Beasleyâs reading in mysticism has, above all, animated his lyrical acuity. He draws from these traditions not merely for their substance, but also to enhance his musical chops. And when he displays those chops, the results can be majestic ⦠a fluency and rhetorical control that no other poet of his generation can match."
â"DAVID WOJAHN, The Kenyon Review

In Theophobia, one of Image's Top Ten of 2012, "the poetâs belief and doubt are deconstructed and then uncertainly rebuilt. In his restless search for (and fear of) God, he combines the ambiguity of postmodernism, the precision of science, and the theology of mysticism into sprawling poems that add surprising twists to our images of divinity...For Beasley, language itself becomes a metaphor for the Incarnation; the joining of divinity with humanity is as messy, oblique, and mysterious as the relationship between a word and its meaning⦠You might be reaching for the dictionary more than once with this book, but trust us: this doesnât lessen its delight in the least.â --Image

âThe poems succeed because this juxtaposition does indeed startle us toward fresh insights. Readers are presented with a mind thinking, a particularly energetic mind, one that enjoys the task. And despite my own initial hesitations, I found the poems ultimately hospitable ⦠Iâm envious of Beasleyâs agility in this book. The poems consolidate the mind with the spirit