The New Book

“Jonathan Bratt Carle’s imaginative poetry emerges from his own lived experiences: the joys, the sorrows, the struggles, and the effortless surrender to the flow of God’s grace. His often elegant, sometimes pithy words don’t merely describe, they also evoke a response from deep within. With great honesty and vulnerability, Bratt Carle explores and reveals the depths of the human condition and taps into the grace that is available to us all. The extensive appendix is an invaluable resource.”


—Mike Potter, hospice chaplain





“Jonathan Bratt Carle’s book of poetry illumines that which cannot be encompassed by words: love at the end of all things. And yet his words and the spaces between them speak—the voice of one working out salvation in fear and trembling and beckoning us to find ourselves within and among salvific words too.”


—Aimee Moiso, associate director, Louisville Institute





“The New Book offers a stirring collection of theologically saturated poems. Jonathan Bratt Carle’s poetry echoes the biblical text, Christian liturgy, and the church’s sacramental mysteries, providing an evocative companion for contemplation, theological reflection, study, or silence.”


—Sarah Jean Barton, assistant professor of occupational therapy and theological ethics, Duke Divinity School and Duke University School of Medicine





“Jonathan Bratt Carle’s poems are ‘poised on the needlepoint of breath,’ stitching the silent spaces between humanity and divinity, origin and ending. Sought in deep quiet, the poems in this collection move past easy certainty to embrace mystery and paradox, grappling with darkness and, ultimately, inviting in the light. Threading through them all is the apt declaration in the title poem: ‘It will be a book of yearning.’”


—Kristin Brace, author of Toward the Wild Abundance