The Work of Creation: Selected Prose

by Luke Hankins

In The Work of Creation, poet, editor, and translator Luke Hankins explores literature, art, aesthetics, ethics, religion, and the life of the spirit in a number of genres, including literary criticism, meditations on art and aesthetics, personal essays, and interviews. Collected in this volume are pieces that have appeared in such places as Books & Culture, Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, The Writer's Chronicle, and the American Public Media national radio program "On Being." "In his generous and illuminating volume of prose, Hankins demonstrates how much of poetry and the maturation of our engagement with it rely upon a power to contain opposites. . . . [T]he book honors a radiance of doubt that eschews both easy ironies and dogmatic polemics. The subtext here is gratitude, a love of work, and a deepening summons to the complexity of art as bound to the complexity of our condition. A beautiful book." --Bruce Bond, author of Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand "This collection is tuned to the pitch of listening--listening with fine intelligence as Hankins explores the nuances of poetry, culture, and history: the soul." --Claire Bateman, author of Leap and Scrape Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). Hankins serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review, and he is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

178 pages, Paperback

Published January 11, 2016

About the author

Luke Hankins is the author of two poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a collection of essays, The Work of Creation. He is also the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. A volume of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was released by Seagull Books in 2019. Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.