Old & New Testaments

the long version

The poems of Old & New Testaments explore Lynn Powell's Southern Baptist upbringing and how that history echoes through her adult experiences of sexual love, self-knowledge, loss, and motherhood. Powell's poems chronicle a life "lush with the ordinary," where truths reveal themselves in the "same, sad, immutable text" of a withered face and in a child's rickety letters tilting across the page. When grace answers grief in these poems, it is not with reassurance, but with a call to "the narrow path to Love."