Wicked City Hymnal

Meaning lost, not recovered. Evidence of meaning remains. Wicked City Hymnal is a collection of poems about language, devotion, memory, bureaucracy, and the systems people build to make sense of what cannot be fully understood. Structured as seven interconnected movements - Invocation, Devotion, Self-Erasure, Rot / Death / Consequence, Language Failure, Wicked City, and Aftermath - the collection moves through sonnets, villanelles, hymns, fragments, prose, and free verse, allowing form itself to become part of the search for meaning. Saints, lovers, bureaucrats, prophets, ghosts, performers, translators, and cities inhabit the same landscape. Silence generates its own narratives. Administrative language becomes liturgy. Love becomes contract. Memory becomes archaeology. Throughout the collection, the ordinary and the mythic continually exchange places. At its heart, Wicked City Hymnal asks how meaning survives when certainty does not. It is less interested in recovering what has been lost than in examining the traces that remain, and the stories we build from them.