Written by the engaging host of the popular show, Poetry Unbound,  the poems of Kitchen Hymns are finely honed melodies of survival—shaped with both humor and anger, force and conviction.

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Kitchen Hymns opens with a question: “Do You Believe in God?” — but the bee, “gone extinct, ” cannot answer, and the grass calls believe “a poor verb.” This collection trades belief for language, and philosophy is grounded in form and narrative. Kitchen Hymns is structured like a ghost mass, where even if God is a “favorite emptiness, ” longing still has things to say: Jesus and Persephone meet at Hell’s exit and discuss survival; someone believes more in birds than belief; hares carry messages from the overworld to the underworld. A study in lyric address, Kitchen Hymns speaks to a shifting “you”: an unknown you; the strange you; a lover, a hated other; the you of erotic desire; the you of creation and destruction. Large themes are informed by and contained in a poetics of observation, humor, trauma, dialogics, lament, rage and praise. Delivered in finely honed melodies, shaped with force and conviction, Kitchen Hymns “reckon[s] with the empty, ” and becomes “busy with a body / not a question.”

Circa l’autore

Pádraig Ó Tuama (b. 1975) is from Ireland. The host of On Being’s Poetry Unbound podcast, and editor of the anthologies of the same name, he splits his time between Belfast and New York City. His writing includes both poetry and prose, and his work been featured on national radio stations in Ireland, Britain, the US, Australia and New Zealand. Profiled by The New Yorker, his poetry has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry Ireland, the Kenyon Review, and The Harvard Review. Kitchen Hymns is his fourth collection of poems.