The Affirmations - by Luke Hathaway (Paperback)

About the Book

"This is a story, writes Luke Hathaway, of transformation. It is a death. It is a birth. / Birth, of course, is very terrible: what can survive it? His fourth collection, and first since Years, Months, and Days, a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2018, The Affirmations is a work of trans poetics in the most radical sense. Begun in motherhood, in an experience of birth as an experience of affirmation, and continued through Hathaway's transition, The Affirmations is a rerelationing with self and other, elder and myth. It's a book about what happened when Hathaway fell in love--and about what happened when love shot the messenger."--

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2023 J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award - Winner of the 2021 Confederation Poets Prize - One of The Times' Best Poetry Books of 2022 - A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 - Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry

"...a trans-mystical work of love and change..."--Ali Blythe, author of Hymnswitch

The mystics who coined the phrase 'the way of affirmation' understood the apocalyptic nature of the word yes, the way it can lead out of one life and into another. Moving among the languages of Christian conversion, Classical metamorphosis, seasonal transformation, and gender transition, Luke Hathaway tells the story of the love that rewired his being, asking each of us to experience the transfiguration that can follow upon saying yes--with all one's heart, with all one's soul, with all one's mind, with all one's strength ... and with all one's body, too.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Affirmations

"Mainstream poetry counts as nonconformist compared with popular culture, but it nevertheless develops its own conformities. For something completely different, look to publishing beyond these shores. Luke Hathaway, a Canadian trans poet, offers just such a point of difference. Influenced by John Donne and George Herbert, and above all by TS Eliot's Four Quartets, Hathaway constructs small marvels of what one poem here calls 'loving jugglery': a feast of transformations."
--The Times

"These are masterful, musical poems about faith and transformation, by one of our best contemporary poets."
--Jason Guriel, for the Globe and Mail

"There is a feeling of it being out of time [...] he has always been a master of the formal [...] anyone who likes deep poetry that is alluding to other things in previous literatures is going to love this book."
--CBC The Next Chapter

"The depth of references offers opportunities for entry and distance alike. Ranging freely across centuries of works, sacred and secular, Hathaway's book, published last week, is as deftly conversant with John Donne as with Auden, as expert in its command of music, metrical and lexical as the maritime landscape. [...] The object [...] of The Affirmations, is not simply reifying what has come before, but challenging, re-imagining, and reclaiming what has been made into a tool of oppression."
--Ploughshares

"Hathaway's poetry collection arrives at just the right time. The Affirmations' silvery, dew-laced spiderweb of intricacy and intimacy connect us simultaneously to myth, futurism and matters of the heart."
--The Tyee

"Luke Hathaway has captured how we survive and thrive by chance, by lucky accident. These spare lines take the reader on a profound journey with the speaker."
--Brecken Hancock, 2021 Confederation Poets Prize judge

"This is a book that will be read and reread by those attuned to its pleasures. For myself, I can only say it could have gone on forever; once I entered the mental world created by The Affirmations, I never wanted to leave it."
--Able Muse

"This time around, Hathaway delivers the story of 'the love that rewired his being' through lyrical poems that lean into the possibilities presented by small-f faith and transformation."
--The Coast

"Hathaway seems to explore the boundaries of poetic form as it relates to an operatic storytelling, pushing at the edges of older forms with a new hand, and a new eye, and seeing what just might be possible."
--rob mclennan

"The Affirmations evocatively asks us to examine this imperfect world in a way that leaves us vulnerable with each other and the earth, alongside Luke."
--Shalan Joudry, author of Elapultiek

'Like his biblical namesake, [Luke Hathaway] offers his own accounting, and so heralds a trans-mystical work of love and change. Driven equally by philia, eros and agape, his poetry pushes for more: more darkness, so you'll attend your light; more light, so you'll attend your darkness."
--Ali Blythe, author of Hymnswitch

Praise for Years, Months, and Days

"[Years, Months, and Days] is carried by Jernigan's obvious respect for her sponsoring material and by her superb ear."
--New York Times

"Exquisite ... deeply resonant ... There's often a metaphysical cast to her forthright observations, which makes them both evocative and poignant."
--Toronto Star

"[This] small and beautiful book should be on your bedside table even if it is as heaped as mine. Just 4" by 5" and fewer than 70 pages, the book consists of untitled, spare, and simply-worded poems which evoke the cycles of life, the seasons, and human longing for meaning and connection. The poems expand in your head, opening your mind to matters beyond the day-to-day."
--Arc Poetry Magazine

About the Author

Luke Hathaway is a trans poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary's University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He has been before now at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea. His book Years, Months, and Days was named a best book of 2018 in the New York Times. He mentors new librettists as a faculty member in the Amadeus Choir's Choral Composition Lab, and makes music with Daniel Cabena as part of the metamorphosing ensemble ANIMA.