Long after Lauds
by Jeanine Hathaway
65 poems, 84 pages
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-1-5326-8929-1
Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers, Inc.
To order: www.WipfandStock.com or Amazon


ABOUT THE BOOK:


Long after Lauds is a sojourn that takes the reader to unexpected places. In a voice that is
funny, smart, and compassionate, sometimes all at once, the book constructs an intro-
spective retrospective of a woman charged with insatiable curiosity and accommodating
doubt looking over a life marked by significant changes: ex-nun, ex-wife, grandmother,
professor emerita, and traveler. Over decades, she acknowledges with gratitude her own
daily shaping by students, grandchildren, rhinos, a public and private history full of saints
and ain’ts. Beyond her earlier community chanting Lauds, she explores its resonance with
wit and wistfulness and arrives at this truth: praise over time alters the one who gives it.


ADVANCE PRAISE:


“With signature wit, word-wariness, and warmth, Jeanine Hathaway brings us a new song
in the lineage of Dickinson, Moore, and Bishop—a brilliant, cool surface that offers,
even so, a profound, subterranean heat, evincing her continuing faithfulness to the
embodied spirit that wishes to save us all. May it be blessed.”
—Scott Cairns, author of Anaphora


“Soon after you open this dazzling book, you begin to feel it was written precisely and
only to you. Not that the poems are confessional—they’re not—but their witty, antic
wordplay and their music accumulate until they feel like a secret language between the
writer and the reader. These poems are urgent. Their passion makes me see stitches,
saints, Paris—almost everything—in a whole new way, teaching questions that may, in
the end, be more significant than answers”
—Jeanine Murray Walker, author of Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking.


“Jeanine Hathaway is the kind of religious poet I deeply admire—earthy, worldly, and of
this world, a writer who works inside the contradictions of division and reconciliation,
doubt and faith; but she is first and foremost a poet who knows her trade. Hathaway
never takes herself too seriously and yet she is taken by her subject matter and by the
serious question she has deeply lived—just how exactly are we being asked to live our
lives?
—Robert Cording, author of Only So Far.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Jeanine Hathaway currently enjoys professor emerita status from Wichita State
University, where she has taught writing and literature. She was a poetry mentor in
Seattle Pacific University’s MFA Program. Hathaway is the author of the
autobiographical novel Motherhouse (1992), the 2001 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize-
winning The Self as Constellation (2002), and a chapbook, The Ex-Nun Poems (2011).
 

FROM THE BOOK:


Buckled Up in the Bible Belt
by Jeanine Hathaway

The lexicon of Kansas is weather,
a vocabulary of extremes, of expletives
that teach the stranger, the native the local

vernacular for heaven-sent: draught, blizzard, sizzle, ice,
the out-of-this-world gypsy word tornado that flings a car over
a trailer park and leaves unbroken one colored egg in its frazzled

basket six feet from where the kitchen was this morning.
I have lived too long in extremis to bother with what
insurance covered and might have replaced, for example

the camera gone back to its maker, its blown roll nearly finished
with shots of model gardens, our bed, the girls at Easter,
their startled dresses, hair gone limp, under a green, uplifting sky.
 

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