Apocrypha: Poems

by John Tessitore

Most organized religions are textual, handed down in books and scrolls.

As religious institutions are formed, religious leaders choose among a vast library of existing texts in order to create official scriptures. The writings they accept are called “canon.” The writings they reject are called “apocrypha”—the books to be kept secret, the poems and songs and stories that are not approved for public reading.

John Tessitore’s Apocrypha is a collection of poems in the scriptural tradition—the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular—that question what it means to be spiritual in the twenty-first century. Some re-evaluate ancient teachings, some revise ancient stories, some tell new stories in a new way.

All imagine a living canon that changes with the times, and that can be rewritten as we accumulate new knowledge and a better understanding of each other.

I feel your fingers on the paper
I grasp them as a lover
grasps the hand of a lover
I will hold you forever

this is the world we build together

52 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 17, 2024

About the author

John Tessitore grew up on Long Island and is a long-time resident of Massachusetts. He has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer, and a biographer. He has taught British and American history and literature at colleges around Boston and has directed national policy studies on education, civil justice, and cultural policy. He now runs his own strategic communications business. His poems have appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Canary, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Wild Roof, The Ekphrastic Review, and other journals and anthologies. His chapbooks, I Sit At This Desk and Dream: Notes from a Sunday Morning on Instagram (2021), We Are Becoming Unbound (2022), All the Lonely American Roads (2022), Parchment: A Prayer Quintet, Body Songs (2023), and For a minute there, it seemed like something was happening. (2023), are available in print and for Kindle, as is his novella Jigsaw Men (2023).