Ebook
An old man feels beautifully broken into prayer by God's presence, and these poems are the shards of that breakage.
“The short, psalm-like, meditative poems of Broken are addresses to God, serving
in part as messages ‘like the biblical whisper,’ mindful of each day, place, and set of circumstances. Each poem carries and presents its own lyrical depth of spiritual insight, love, awareness, and serenity that bind the speaker here both to the nearness of God and to the uniqueness of their own specific moments in life and what they reveal.”
—Roger Jones, author of Strata: Poems
“These poems, quiet, urgent, open into their reader with the same love their maker feels for the world. Attention is the partner of longing here, and they bear weight by understanding that the self opens only as it is opened by likeness, where pear flesh is flesh itself, where one can speak and fall like rain, or bones, or like a window between inside and outside. These are beautiful devotions, invitations, quiet songs.”
—Kathleen Peirce, author of Vault: A Poem
“With a voice that both soothes and startles with its quiet singularity, Robert Morrison Randolph seeks and finds in Broken what all Christian poetry seeks—beauty and the One who is the author of all.”
—Richard Pierce, associate professor of English, Waynesburg University
Robert Morrison Randolph is professor of English at Waynesburg University. He has been a Fulbright teaching scholar in Finland and Greece, and for twelve years pastored a small rural church near the Monongahela River. He is author of Floating Girl: Angel of War (2006) and The Appalachian Archive (2021).