Poetry News

All About Orison Books

Originally Published: May 10, 2016

Luke Hankins of Orison Books is the star of this interview, conducted by Dante Di Stefano, which appears on the Best American Poetry Blog. In the section "Meet the Press," Di Stefano introduces Orison, a publisher whose mission is to "publish spiritually engaged poetry, fiction, and non-fiction books of exceptional literary merit, and to promote cultural conversation around the intersections of spirituality and literature." From the beginning:

DD: In her poem, “Ennui,” Stella Vinitchi Radulescu refers to Rainer Maria Rilke as her “father up / in the sky.” If there is any poet who embodies the mission of Orison Books it would be Rilke, a man who strove to write from inside the most terrifying angels. There is that famous passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that begins: “…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences.” Could you begin by channeling Rilke and speaking about the poems you have published at Orison Books as experiences?

LH: “Sit down, angel,” Radulescu also writes, “I am desperately alive” (“heart heart heart”). Like Rilke, Radulescu’s intimation of the danger and sublimity of the divine does not prevent her from speaking with and to it on the most familiar of terms—asserting a spiritual equality (and equivalence?) with even the highest manifestation of being. And, as with Rilke, Radulescu’s poems ought to be considered “spiritual” not primarily because of their subject matter, but rather because of their ability to suggest and embody a mode of being that is outside the ordinary. Her work is deeply experiential in this way.

Contemplating a broken ancient sculpture of Apollo, Rilke concludes, “You must change your life.” The greatest spiritual art is that which offers us an aesthetic experience that leaves us irrevocably changed. Orison Books’ goal is to discover and champion this kind of literature. One of our latest books, Jordan Rice’s Constellarium, is a fine example of this. Rice’s poems sometimes delve into explicitly religious and spiritual subject matter—often from a critical standpoint, in fact—but that’s not what makes her poems “spiritual,” in my mind. The spiritual aspect of her poetry is that it, as Fatimah Asghar has so insightfully noted, makes us contemplate “the body inside”—the fundamental and mysterious grounds of being rather than the superficial and readily apparent ones.

Read more at Best American Poetry.