Driving the Beast - (Sewanee Poetry) by Christopher Bakken (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Driving the Beast is a book about movement. Christopher Bakken's poems shift between Greece and the American Midwest, tracking the restless nature of selfhood, while seeking glimpses of the sacred in landscapes scarred by history and political turmoil. The book's back-and-forth mirroring invites readers to confront their own reflections in moments of catastrophe and wonder, and to view them alongside those of immigrants and refugees.

Review Quotes

"Driving the Beast is an epic pilgrimage through underworlds of myth and memory. From the legend-riven islands of Greece to the American heartland, Christopher Bakken confronts mortality, history, and the passage of time in poems as unsparing as they are luminous."--Jane Satterfield

"Driving the Beast offers an esoteric theology, one that trusts hunger as revelation, as nudge, as indicator of where the pilgrim ought to go and how the pilgrim might hope to proceed."--Scott Cairns

"A theologian of sensuosity, a memoirist refusing nostalgia, a seer, Bakken offers us the shards of experience that somehow, almost, never quite, and yet still might put our broken world back together again."--Alan Michael Parker

"Not surprising for a poet who has spent time interrogating the ancients and inhabiting the modern cities they bequeathed us, Bakken composes ritual songs that point past the surfaces of experience to what is both mysterious and essential."--David Yezzi

About the Author

Christopher Bakken is the author of three previous books of poetry and the culinary memoir Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table. Twice a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches at Allegheny College and serves as director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos.