Jen Currin's acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities , announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in her new collection, Hagiography , see her trademark wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new territory. These poems push life's barely hidden strangeness into the light, and present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event. In Hagiography , mind and sense and the world they move through are interwoven to create a mysterious, familiar, vexing and continuously fascinating human drama. There are no saints in Hagiography , but there are many curious characters looking for spiritual truth. Hagiography is populated by seekers: ghosts, spiders, sisters, pilgrims, children, tigers, therapists, witches, grandfathers and birds. Hagiography starts with death and ends with birth. In between, life after life. ' Hagiography is a delight for the reader's heart and mind - hagios, meaning sacred, plus graphein, to write.

One lovely poem after another guides us through what holds us like a light.' - Robin Blaser 'Currin's language is not so much surreal as it is devoted to the strangeness of what really happens to bodiesand selves in the world . this book is a conversion narrative . it is a story of how we believe language can change and how we believe change can speak.' - Aaron McCollough, author of Little Ease and Double Venus.