It’s been a long time since the last formal announcement in this space about my second poetry collection, but the wait is finally (almost) over. Dreams and Prayers is complete, except some final proofreading, and plans for its release are underway.

As that post from 2017 explained, and several of the intervening “year-in-review” posts have mentioned, Dreams and Prayers is my second collection of my poetry. It consists of seventy-five poems, divided thematically into three sections … about which more below.

Much like A Year in Verse, my first collection, which I published in Advent 2014, each poem is accompanied by at least one public-domain engraving, drawing, or other illustration. (For a few that are “particularly hard to illustrate” the illustration is a generic divider, but most are chosen specifically for the poem they accompany. There are also a couple of images that I used in A Year in Verse, but the vast majority are “new to me.”) The typesetting has also improved since A Year in Verse: instead of every image being either completely above, completely below, or on the page opposite its poem, in this collection a few poems bring text alongside part of their illustration, and in one case where the illustration was originally designed as a “frame” the poem is set inside it.

All the poems have appeared before on this blog, but nearly all have seen at least some revision, and some have been substantially revised, since then. Also, each poem that didn’t originally have a title now has one. (The poems with titles like “Untitled Metaphor #3” have not had that changed, but there are no poems identified solely by their first line, which made distinguishing them from a new stanza of the previous poem difficult.) None of the poems in Dreams and Prayers previously appeared in A Year in Verse; this is the first appearance in print of every poem.

Dreams and Prayers is divided into three sections: The first section, “Metaphors,” contains the “Untitled Metaphor” poems and several others built around the application of metaphorical images; it is also the part of the collection where I placed any poems that involved imagery but didn’t fit into the more narrowly defined scope of either of the other sections. The second section, “Memory and Dreams,” contains poems drawn from reminiscences or sparked by dreams. And finally, the third section, “Higher Things,” consists of poems either about or addressed to God.

After coming up with a basic concept, collecting a few public-domain paintings that could conceivably be used to implement it, and then spending many months either intermittently trying to put them together without making significant progress or just procrastinating, I commissioned Hannah Linder to design a cover.

Here is the design she created for me:

I’m quite pleased with the result, and with this designer’s process—which would have been even smoother if this were a more standard book (such as a novel).

Since some (admittedly cursory) research suggests that poetry books are most successful when launched in either the spring or the fall, and my preparations are not far enough along for a release before the end of spring without everything going perfectly, I plan to release Dreams and Prayers to the public this fall.

To be on the safe side, I am tentatively planning to release the collection in mid-to-late October, hoping to bring it forward as timelines permit. Two prominent possibilities due to literary resonance are October 14, the birthday of e. e. cummings (whose work on the whole I like, certainly more than most of his contemporary imitators I have had the misfortune to read, but is otherwise unrelated), and September 20, the birthday of Charles Williams (who has been highly influential on my work, but more my Arthurian poems than this collection), but nothing has been settled yet. I will announce a more precise release date once I have it, and any advancements of the timeline as I decide them.

I plan to make the ebook available for preorder some time in advance of the official release date. (Unfortunately, Amazon KDP does not provide that option for print books, so I will only be able to offer preorders for hard copies if I choose another print-on-demand “publisher”.) Once I’ve set that up, I will make a further announcement of that here as well.

The content of the collection is finalized, except perhaps for final proofreading, so I am no longer in need of beta readers for this project … but if you are a reader of poetry, particularly of the kind of poetry I write (which I am well aware is not to every reader’s taste!), I would be happy to provide you a (digital) copy in exchange for an honest review, so please get in touch.

I hope you will join me in anticipating the release of Dreams and Prayers.