A Plea for Secular Gods - by Bryan Daniel Price (Paperback)

About the Book

Poems about families who do not talk anymore and strange manhoods shared across generations, about memories of catastrophic failures, and the disappointment that entails being human.

Book Synopsis

A plea for secular gods was written under the strain of spiritual crisis. The author lost his father and maternal grandparents over a short period of time between 2016 and 2017, which put him to working on something called The Death's Hand Elegies. This is what came of it-poems about families who do not talk anymore, strange manhoods shared across generations, memories of catastrophic failures, and the disappointment that entails being human. Poems, to be blunt, about death, sex, memory, and guilt. In the end, these are deeply religious poems written by a person who has felt, for a long time, the uncanny absence of gods.

Review Quotes

Bryan D. Price's starkly beautiful poems speak to, and for, all of us whose lives are to one extent or another "held in place with safety pins," "gesturing toward life and persisting." Yet miraculously, alongside their profound and relatable angst, these poems are inspiring, urging us not to "waste the / command to go forth and reciprocate" and reminding us of the necessity "of trying to / be your beautiful actor." Courageous integrity and underlying humanity animate Price's work, building on the unflinching honesty of his assessment of his fellow "self-contained vessel[s] of putrid annoyance" to remind us of the unique value of poetry - such as this deeply felt and probing work -- to "render pain . . . us[ing] small words as bitten down as seeds" "until you have made sense of the brutality."-Susan Lewis, winner of the Washington Prize for Zoom and editor-in-chief of Posit



Though not a practicing Catholic, Bryan Price's A plea for secular gods is imbued with prayerful strangeness and surreal piety. In these irreverently reverent poems, Price captures what it means to be a work in progress, yearning toward faith. In "The Bystander," the beleaguered speaker intones "these are the last / days there are no more oceans to speak of no means / of full immersion in the baptismal font"; his yearning to be reconfigured, if not reborn, is palpable. Both quasi-religious and elegiac, Price takes us to places where "debris flows fill the house with frogs ... where we go to take pictures of other people's pain," yet the hope of being saved is never far off, as in "who couldn't use a makeshift altar / a place to just be." I admire this book for its candor and exactitude, for reminding me of the importance of questing toward something to put our faith in, even if we keep coming smack up against "a little silhouette of misunderstanding," even if "memories ... fall off like fingernails or a crow's bill or else throw themselves into the ocean."-Martha Silano, author of Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019).

Winged things, the poems in Bryan Price's "A plea for secular gods" ricochet between terrestrial and celestial with an energy that drives poem and reader to breathtaking conclusion after breathtaking conclusion. With their ghosts, soothsayers, fortune tellers, witches and goddesses-and as if mimicking the bright flash of our lives on earth, punctuated by mortal reminders-these panoramic poems encompass. Generous, authentic, deeply felt, and candid, they land on words like silence, endurance, forever, altogether. This is where land, yes, but before they land, they fly.-Carolyn Guinzio, author of A Vertigo Book (The Word Works, 2021).