Prayer Book

In one of the prayer-poems compiled in Matt Mauch's Prayer Book, the speaker prays to a rock without coming across as phony. Though essentially secular, there is, in these poems, a gut-level understanding of an individual's turn toward that which is instinctually divine-a rejection of dogma and rules in an attempt to take back something essential: the feeling (rather than the idea) of prayer as hope, prayer as song, prayer as poem. Among the laundromats, VFWs, parking lots, and backyard cookouts-many of the poems occurring in places where urban and natural landscapes meet-are often-humorous portraits of vulnerability warring with a kind of I-don't-want-to-wilt-too-much strength. The various speakers are lying in a ditch, wanting to become a brick in a building, communing with a pigeon, stuck in moments they want to get out of (or get something out of), wandering and wondering when they crave the ability to be arriving and deciding