Radiant Obstacles

“In Luke Hankins’ Radiant Obstacles, hibiscus and hummingbirds, cardinals and pear trees, human beings (and their prayers and anguish) keep emerging from and returning to the vapor. These luminous poems meditate on the divine, on the gap between language and the object-world, on the mind and the body and each of their constraints and vast potentialities. Hankins has made ‘a house for an idea about beauty’—may we each visit its bewilderment, terror, and solace.”


—Nomi Stone, author of Kill Class and Stranger’s Notebook





“Our exile into Being and into ‘where Eden once stood, in the ruins,’ becomes for Hankins the source of stunning meditations on metaphysics, faith, and the apparent obstacles to belief that stand as ‘radiant obstacles’ in our path—even the obstacles to the divine leading us into the radiance of hard-won affirmation. The ex of ex nihilo becomes the way out of spiritual nothingness into the ecstatic celebration of the body and the physical world, a nothingness negated through a hard-fought battle. ‘I could not presume to know the Maker’s mind, / but I know something of my own— / I could not bear / to make such magnificent and fleeting things,’ Hankins writes. Yet, in these poems, he has: become, that is, a maker of poems about that fleetingness, poems imbued with a beauty whose radiance dispels the very darkness they illuminate.”


—Bruce Beasley, author of All Soul Parts Returned and Theophobia





“Radiant Obstacles is a book alive with paradox and mystery. ‘I’ve made the mistake / of trying to grasp each strand / of the world’s complexity,’ Hankins writes, and the poetry he delivers stretches toward something eternally beyond reach. These are poems that long to hear the earth speak, while knowing that it won’t. They admire beauty, even as it dissipates and falls. They call out to the divine, and return to us having transformed metaphysical yearning into a deeply resonant art.”


—Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design and Mezzanines





"[Hankins] shuns the vacuous bourgeois abstractions that lately pass for 'spirituality' and recognizes the awful gulf between the word and the thing. Doubt, faith, language, and embodiment are of a piece for Hankins."


-Brian Volck, "Close Reading": The Slant Books Blog





https://slantbooks.com/2020/07/23/the-poetry-of-disbelief/





“Hankins considers the paradoxes of holiness in this new collection, his questions often focused on our distance from the divine. [...] Hankins’s narrative voice reaches toward that imperceptible but desirous bridge between mortal and immortal, temporary and eternal.” -Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions