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Wicked City Hymnal
By: Christine Svensson
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.
About The Author
Christine Svensson is a Swedish-American poet living in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work explores devotion, memory, language, identity, grief, and the stories people create to survive them. Drawing on influ…
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A formally inventive collection of poems exploring devotion, language, grief, and the stories we create to survive them, where sonnets, fragments, and hymns become evidence rather than answers.
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ISBN 13 (SOFT): 9781665799393
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781665799409
