Print this page
Kitchen Hymns

Kitchen Hymns

Paperback (13 Mar 2025)

  • $16.48
Pre-order

Includes delivery to the United States

Check stock

Publisher's Synopsis


Written by the engaging host of the popular show, Poetry Unbound, the poems of Kitchen Hymns are finely honed melodies of survival-shaped with both humor and anger, force and conviction.

Pádraig Ó Tuama's Kitchen Hymns opens with a question: "Do You Believe in God?" - but the bee, "gone extinct," cannot answer, and the grass calls believe "a poor verb." This collection trades belief for language, and philosophy is grounded in form and narrative. Kitchen Hymns is structured like a ghost mass, where even if God is a "favorite emptiness," longing still has things to say: Jesus and Persephone meet at Hell's exit and discuss survival; someone believes more in birds than belief; hares carry messages from the overworld to the underworld. A study in lyric address, Kitchen Hymns speaks to a shifting "you": an unknown you; the strange you; a lover, a hated other; the you of erotic desire; the you of creation and destruction. Large themes are informed by and contained in a poetics of observation, humor, trauma, dialogics, lament, rage and praise. Delivered in finely honed melodies, shaped with force and conviction, Kitchen Hymns "reckon[s] with the empty," and becomes "busy with a body / not a question."

Book information

ISBN: 9781556597107
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Imprint: Copper Canyon Press
Pub date:
Language: English
Number of pages: 112
Weight: -1g
Height: 152mm
Width: 229mm

We recommend

$2.00off

How Not to Be Afraid

Gareth I. Higgins

Paperback
Published 30 Apr 2021

Save $2.00

  • RRP $19.02
  • $17.02
Add to basket

$1.78off

Borders and Belonging

Padraig Ó Tuama, Gle...

Paperback
Published 20 Jan 2021

Save $1.78

  • RRP $16.48
  • $14.70
Add to basket

$2.79off

Ghost Ship

A. D. A. France-Will...

Paperback
Published 10 Jul 2020

Save $2.79

  • RRP $25.36
  • $22.57
Add to basket

$1.33off

Seeing the Light

Kenneth C. Steven

Paperback
Published 20 Sep 2023

Save $1.33

  • RRP $13.94
  • $12.61
Add to basket

$1.19off

The Vanishing Song

Jay Hulme

Paperback
Published 29 Sep 2023

Save $1.19

  • RRP $13.94
  • $12.75
Add to basket

$3.65off

Greek Myths

Jean Menzies (editor)

Hardback
Published 25 May 2023

Save $3.65

  • RRP $13.94
  • $10.29
Add to basket

$3.81off

Tolkien's Hidden Pictures

Mark McGivern

Paperback
Published 23 Feb 2023

Save $3.81

  • RRP $20.28
  • $16.47
Add to basket

$2.69off

Desire

Micheal O'Siadhail

Hardback
Published 01 Nov 2023

Save $2.69

  • RRP $26.58
  • $23.89
Add to basket

$1.71off

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Isaiah Berlin (autho...

Paperback
Published 28 Apr 2022

Save $1.71

  • RRP $11.40
  • $9.69
Add to basket
The Ramayana of Valmiki

Valmiki (author), Ro...

Paperback
Published 15 Mar 2022

  • $33.11
Add to basket