Liturgical Calendar

Using the structure of the liturgical calendar and the lives of the saints for inspiration, Kevin Brown explores not only faith, but subjects ranging from love to childhood and from grammar to grace. The saints' backgrounds serve as metaphors for our lives today, as we struggle with our mortality and our morality. In these poems, Brown is able to laugh at himself and his failings while reminding us of our own. He points out where our various approaches to faith make us better people and where we fail to follow what we tell others to do. In these poems, the miraculous becomes ordinary even as ordinary events and people are imbued with the sacred, granting readers hope for themselves and for the world.

""Kevin Brown's Liturgical Calendar marks its own stations, finds its own occasions for praise. Though holy days receive their due, these are poems of ordinary time, of the losses and miracles in any life, celebrating small gifts of the moment and sanctifying 'the ash / of our hands / and hearts.'""
--James Scruton, Mary B. Holmes Professor of Literature, Bethel University, McKenzie, TN

""Kevin Brown's glorious new poems use the liturgical calendar as a means of engaging with the vexing questions of now and of eternity, of time and timelessness. . . . These are poems to savor and cherish, as they move from everyday life to the deepest metaphysical mysteries. I can't praise this marvelous new collection enough for its honest, hard-won wisdom. It's simply beautiful.""
--Anya Silver, Associate Professor of English, Mercer University, Atlanta, GA


Kevin Brown is a professor at Lee University. He has published two other books of poetry--A Lexicon of Lost Words, winner of the 2013 Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, and Exit Lines (2009)--as well as two chapbooks. He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again (2012), and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels (2012). He received his MFA from Murray State University.