Mass for Shut-Ins (Volume 117) (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Mass for Shut-Ins is the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, selected by award-winning poet Rae Armantrout. Mary-Alice Daniel confronts tricontinental culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds. African and Western mythic systems and modern rituals originate an ill-omened universe. Here, it is always night, grim night, under absurd moons. Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, poems map speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It animates an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy–these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime.