Parchment: A Prayer Quintet

by John Tessitore

A Prayer Quartet is a collection of five poems, each a yearning for spiritual renewal in a troubled age. Inspired by (but not beholden to) the outcasts, beats, and mystics of the American past , it is an urgent, lyric and sometimes-ironic plea for better angels.

To do this now is insanity, I know,
a prayer for a prayer-less century (so far),
but is it crazier than relying
on the knowledge of history?
Is it crazier than denying all progress?
It it crazier than preferring the darkness of the past?

28 pages, Paperback

Published October 27, 2022

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).

Reviews

[Tung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: John is a friend I’ve known since college. This is my fourth Tessitore read this year; but whereas the first 3 were long-form poems, this is a collection of five poems organized around a common theme. The dedication gives us a clue as to that theme – it’s dedicated to Harry Partch, a composer and music theorist known for his experimentation within the bounds of classical structure. The poems, then, speak to themes of personal growth and exploration through both new and ancient themes of life. For example, in "Chromolodeon", Tessitore writes of fighting off conformity: “The spirit of my rebellion must be . . . adolescent. Its genius is lust, to regain the wonder, the excitement of lawless change, to feel the surge and reject the enormous apparatus of our freedoms – school boards and senatesm pundits and police forces – to remember all the ways we trade the simple for complication.” And yet in "Prophesy I", he alludes to the spiritual: “the prophet is not his story not illness sorrow anxiety not the sanctioned murder not the severed finger not the gruesome martyr not the iron fetter not the shrinking tumor not the barren womb the prophet is the word on paper the poison we swallow together the only sound in a quiet room”. There is a spirituality that runs underneath all 5 poems. I continue to appreciate the internal alliteration and cadence of his poetry. Recommended.