Litany of Flights
Winner of the 2020 Paraclete Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2022 Gold Medal in Poetry, Illumination Book Awards
Finalist, 2021 National Indie Excellence Awards
Winner of the 2020 Paraclete Poetry Prize, Litany of Flights is a luminous examination of the journey of the soul, from moments of loss to moments of incandescent transformation. These poems remind us to behold the extraordinary in the ordinary, and that the secret workings of the divine occur even through the difficult: “the painful paring of your hollow bones has made you light.” Drawing on the beauty of the natural world, the devastating effects of drought and wildfires, tender moments of daily experience, and lessons of the saints, the poet creates a landscape of light and darkness, with unexpected turns into divine presence and absence. Through a spiral of red-tailed hawks, the nest of a mourning dove, the parting of waters, and the ripeness of a persimmon, this shimmering collection invites the reader to singular and transfiguring flight.
Praise and Reviews:
“Litany of Flights turns its gaze to the natural world and to the heightened sacramental reality with which, as Hopkins puts it, all the created order is charged. At every turn, these mysteries are grounded in the sensory details of the world we apprehend, tree, sun, and star, squirrel and deer, fruit and flower, hawk and dove.” —Sally Thomas, author of Motherland
“Hogan’s collection is lush with rivers, moonlight, and flowers. It is also sharp with scrub brush, lightning, and flame. Like the Scripture she draws from, her poems both comfort and unsettle with fierce imagery: ‘You wait for me to discover your love among the leaves and thorns…I join/your written roses in swaying dance, in blood-red bloom of belonging.’ Her poems are an invitation directly into the heart of this swaying dance. This is a debut that will draw you into wonder without letting go.” —Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place
“Combines the rich language of Gerard Manley Hopkins with the fierce passion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to become a twenty-first-century singer of the ancient Song of Songs. A new, loving, musical voice that you will want to hear and incorporate into your prayers.” —Paul J. Willis, author of Deer at Twilight: Poems from the North Cascades
“Some poets say their poems are borne in them; some believe poems come through: that the writer is merely the vessel. Such poets often take less credit for that voice of which they are the vehicle. These are the poets who give thanks and who praise. They come straight out of the mystical tradition, locked in a dance with the music and lyricism of St. Francis, Hopkins, St. John of the Cross, Herbert, Rumi, and Kabir. Laura Reece Hogan adds her name to this tradition in Litany of Flights. She is a true poet, and this is a sensational debut.” —David Keplinger, author of The Long Answer: New and Selected Poems
“Hogan never yearns to escape this world, or the hurt and pain of living in it—rather her poems yearn to enter the world ever more deeply. What links them is their posture of prayer: the work of paring away what is nonessential in the speaker until, hollowed, like the bones of birds, she is light enough for flight.” —Robert Cording, author of Walking with Ruskin, and Professor Emeritus at College of the Holy Cross
“It is a rare privilege these days to dive into a poetry collection and find that the word that keeps reverberating in your ear is joy: from ‘vats of joy’ to ‘cascades of joy,’ from ‘living in joy’ to ‘the joy in spilling praise.’ Yet, joy does not come easy in Litany of Flights, for there are ‘clefts of night’ and ‘barren months,’ a church that burns, its cross ‘tumbling into the nave like a sparkler.’ Elsewhere, longing is a ‘grounded bird’ that ‘thrashes against metal.’ But the longing that animates this exquisite collection is for the One Who never fails, Who comes in cloud and burning bush, Who consumes and fulfills. And Laura Hogan knows this, viscerally. No wonder her poetry brims with joy; she knows what it is to be a creature in love with her Creator, thus able to offer—credibly—joy as the ‘full flower of love.’” —Sofia Starnes, former Virginia Poet Laureate, author of The Consequence of Moonlight
“Laura Reece Hogan’s award-winning collection of poems draws us into a watercolor of words where the material world she vividly presents bleeds into another world, one invisible yet powerful in its beauty and Providence. In poem after poem, we find ourselves firmly in place, our senses doused with Hogan’s luxuriant imagery, but then somehow, seamlessly, we are transported to a realm of spiritual light.”—Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Psaltery & Lyre.
“This gorgeous collection shimmers with its fusion of humanity, the natural world, and the Divinity which permeates and transcends all. Hogan’s lyricism allows these poems to soar, dive, rest, brood, sing in darkness, and ascend again. There are poems of joy and wonder, echoing Mary Oliver, as well as echoes of Hopkins’ alliterative brilliance. Yet the voice in this collection is very much Hogan’s own.”—Sarah Law, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry
“An ode to joy and an ode to birds, sugar maples and the chaparral, Litany of Flights soars its way through drought, fire, and mercy. In this debut collection, fire is both destroyer and creator, a constant source of personal consumption and renewal…. Springing from the beauty of California, the book excavates the shock of grief and the eternal possibility of relationship and reconciliation.”—Erika Rasmussen, America Magazine.
“The entire collection is ‘a call to the soaring beyond,’ to ‘doorways of egg and gold // and open eyes’ (“Nocturne”). Litany of Flights allows us to sense the wings, touch the fire, and glimpse the sacramental vision of saints and mystics.”—Lesley Clinton, Christianity & Literature
“Winner of the 2020 Paraclete Poetry Prize, this collection of poetry is a lush meditation on the presence of the divine in nature and in daily experiences.”—February 2021 list of recommended books in U.S. Catholic.
“The themes of birds and flight echo throughout the volume, but you know [Hogan’s] always reaching for something else. The poems may ostensibly be about nature, or rain, or trees, or tranquility, or the splendor of the sun, but each brings you, sometimes gently and sometimes quickly, into the spiritual…. Litany of Flights leaves us with a sense of wonder.”—Glynn Young, Tweetspeak Poetry.
“In Litany of Flights, Laura Reece Hogan offers an ascending vision of life in a fraught and fiery world. Against the sometimes-metaphorical, sometimes-literal Southern California wildfires of her surroundings, Hogan juxtaposes the all-consuming fire of God’s presence—that ‘Inferno of a thousand suns’ whose incandescent love sends human hearts soaring.”—Cameron D. Brooks, Conversant.