Angela O'Donnell

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  Holy Land : Poems

  $21.00

  “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” -Exodus 3:5″The Holy Land is everywhere.” -Black Elk

  The two epigraphs that preface Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Holy Land introduce the reader to the central theme that permeates her poems: that holy places deserve to be regarded with reverence and that all places are holy places. In her afterward, the poet traces these foundational concepts to her Catholic childhood wherein religious instruction consisted largely of memorizing the Baltimore Catechism. “One of questions the Catechism poses is ‘Where is God?’ The answer is ‘God is everywhere.’ We believed this to be true. God was in church, but God was also in our house (a crucifix in every room), in the backyard, in our Buick (rosary beads swinging from the rearview mirror), at our birthday parties in the basement, and in our own bodies. And though those places may not sound very holy, they were. Because God was there. Is there.”

  In addition to affirming this foundational belief, these poems extend the terrain, moving beyond the geographical and the physical to the temporal, the carnal, the intellectual, and the spiritual realms. They assert that our days are blessed, our bodies are blessed, our minds and souls are all blessed and sacred ground. The poet explores a broad spectrum of physical locations, beginning with poems set in the Holy Land and moving on to places closer to home, ranging from the west of Ireland to rural Minnesota, from New York City to the Texas border. She also probes the temporal spaces we occupy, experiences of death and birth, love and loss, desire and desolation that mark our human passage.

  The English word holy is related to the Germanic word heilig, a word that means blessed and also carries within it the idea of wholeness. Holy Land attempts to honor both the holiness and the wholeness of our world-from Gotham to Golgotha, the Bronx River to the Sea of Galilee-and to honor the holiness and wholeness of our blessed and broken humanity.

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  Andalusian Hours : Poems From The Porch Of Flannery O’Connor

  $20.00

  Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor is a collection of 101 sonnets that channel the voice of celebrated fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor. In these poems, poet and scholar Angela Alaimo O’Donnell imagines the rich interior life Flannery lived during the last fourteen years of her life in rural Georgia on her family’s farm named “Andalusia.” Each poem begins with an epigraph taken from O’Connor’s essays, stories, or letters; the poet then plumbs Flannery’s thoughts and the poignant circumstances behind them, welcoming the reader into O’Connor’s private world. Together the poems tell the story of a brilliant young woman who enjoyed a bright and promising childhood, was struck with lupus just as her writing career hit its stride, and was forced to return home and live out her days in exile, far from the literary world she loved. By turns tragic and comic, the poems in Andalusian Hours explore Flannery’s loves and losses, her complex relationship with her mother, her battle with her illness and disability, and her passion for her writing. The poems mark time in keeping with the liturgical hours O’Connor herself honored in her prayer life and in her quasi-monastic devotion to her vocation and to the home she learned to love, Andalusia.

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  Still Pilgrim : Poems

  $21.00

  Still Pilgrim is a collection of poems that chronicles the journey of life as seen through the eyes of a keenly-observant friend and fellow traveler. The reader accompanies the Still Pilgrim as she maps universal terrain, navigating the experiences that constitute her private history yet also serve to remind the reader of his or her own moments of enlightenment, epiphany, and encounter with mystery. Each of the 58 poems of the collection marks a way station along the pilgrimage where the Pilgrim and reader might pause and ponder before continuing with the inevitable march forward.

  At the center of this travel book lies a paradox: the Pilgrim’s desire for the gift of stillness amid the flux and flow of time, change, and circumstance. “Be still and know that I am God,” sings the Psalmist, channeling the voice of the divine. “Teach us to care and not care. Teach us to sit still,” prays the poet, T.S. Eliot. Still Pilgrim depicts and embodies this human dilemma–our inevitable movement through time, moment by moment, day by day, and the power of art to stop both time and our forward march, to capture the present moment so we might savor the flavor of life.

  “The Still Pilgrim’s history consists of flashes of joy and visitations of sorrow, engagement with saints and with artists (the Pilgrim’s personal patron saints), epiphanies sparked by words and songs and stories, revelations triggered by encounters with beauty and terror. The reader who perseveres through these poems is no longer merely a reader–he or she is a partner in pilgrimage and a friend. These poems have become your poems, this story your story, bespeaking our (un)common beginnings and our equally (un)common end.” — Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, from the Afterword

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  Province Of Joy

  $21.00

  The Province of Joy is a book of hours rooted in the rich theological imagination of fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor. A lifelong Catholic devoted to liturgical prayer, O’Connor was also an avid reader and thinker who lived a rich spiritual life. Cutting a broad swath through spiritual and theological texts of every stamp, O’Connor engaged ideas about the nature of prayer and its many forms on a daily basis and often shared them in her correspondence, essays, and stories. This book brings together O’Connor’s practice of prayer and the rich spiritual context within which O’Connor lived and out of which she wrote.

  O’Donnell organizes this devotional around six themes:

  * The False Self and the True Self
  * Blindness & Vision
  * Limitation & Grace
  * The Mystery of the Incarnation
  * Revelations & Resurrections
  * The Christian Comedy.

  In addition, she presents brief reflections suggesting links between the themes, readings, and prayers of the day with O’Connor’s fiction. These parallels illustrate of some of the ways in which O’Connor’s practice of her faith and her art intersect and serve to illuminate one another.

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