Also the Gentle World by Robert Morrison Randolph

“Robert Randolph’s Also the Gentle World reads like wind slipping through curtains—quiet, reverent, and impossibly holy. His poems do not shout; they listen. In these verses, the ordinary is transfigured; a teacup becomes a portal, a flagpole becomes a brushstroke, a moth’s wing whispers of distant oceans. Reading Randolph is like walking beside a stream with an old friend who names the light as it falls. This collection reminds me why we write poetry in the first place—not to explain, but to invite wonder.”

–Zachary Yonko, author of Sixty-Six Reveries: A Poet’s Walk Through the Field of Scripture

There is nothing slight about Robert Randolph’s newest collection, Also the Gentle World. These brief, delicate poems mesmerize. They contain worlds that reverberate one within the other—“Within / the moth’s wing / a distant sea / breaks on stone.” Meditate on the silence Randolph’s images create. Let snow fall through you. Watch as “stars open / their glass doors.” These are poems to memorize.

–Marjorie Maddox, author of Seeing Things