A Strange Catechism

About the Book

Every day she comes and stands, turning slowing, counterclockwise, in the parking lot. She holds in her arms a bundle of infant’s clothes. She is praying, calling for her departed child to return to the nest of her body.

In A Strange Catechism, Justen Ahren relates the story of a mother and her surviving son, as they journey through grief, lose and separation to a deeper understanding of how life is constructed out of what our ‘fingers keep making in the air/ until dawn’— those fleeting things we long for, made real by our longing and our praying for them.

“The poems in Justen Ahren’s Strange Catechism are songs whose music exists to make beauty out of profound sadness. They are rhythmic, empathic, and polyphonic but behind each one is a voice who says hello to darkness and then sings to it—all the while wondering about ‘golondrinas’ and ‘the hydrangeas’ blue clouds’, all the while wondering if ‘the world without [him]/may be the real one.’”

--Jennifer Tseng

“This collection contains the voice of a poet whose work aches with beauty. The poems are characterized by the paradox of austerity as abundance and religious mystery as lucidity. In Justen Ahren’s search for grace we find poetry of excellence.”

--Jennifer Clement

About the Author

West Tisbury, Massachusetts Poet Laureate Justen Ahren has published poems in numerous literary journals including, most recently, Fulcrum, BorderSenses, Borderlands, Texas Poetry Review, and Comstock Review. A graduate of Emerson College’s MFA program in creative writing, Justen is founder and Director of Noepe Center for Literary Arts and the Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency. He teaches poetry and writing workshops on Martha’s Vineyard and in Labro, Italy.