First, right to the point. I am very pleased to announce that I am finished with my next book, The Locust Years: Poems, which will release on May 27th, 2025, from Wiseblood Books.
The final cover, revealed above, captures the spirit that I hope you will find in this book: full of a certain simplicity and directness of form, mysterious, luminous, and, in its way, happily perilous. (More on that in a moment—read on to hear more about the story of this book.)
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But first, a word from Your Guy. Pre-ordering a book is more important than ever today, for a variety of reasons. To launch a book well requires community momentum and some measure of timing. In a retail and media environment where the human mixes so constantly with the digital, the algorithms baked into everything (even the website on which you are reading these words) affect a new book’s visibility to buyers in all sorts of visible and invisible ways. There aren’t a ton of levers that an author like myself can pull, but we know that early evidence of excitement about a project (purchases, “likes,” reviews, clicks, etc.) significantly impact the early traction and success of a project.
All this to say: if you are a supporter of my work, purchasing this book now, largely sight unseen and in advance, is a direct and practical encouragement of my writing that will have just a bit more leverage than the same purchase, say, two months after the release, or two years (though I hope you’re buying it then, too! Buy it constantly! Make buying it your new hobby!). For you, my most attentive friends, to do this truly makes a difference.
But it should be fun too, right? I think sometimes that ideas and moments should have souvenirs, just like places do. That’s the idea behind it—a little literary collectible that celebrates this moment, and is intended to be shared with all of you. Remember when we were there?
Little buddy!
I know from the past that many of my committed readers like to get a copy of my books at launch for themselves, and at least one more to gift to a friend. To honor this kindness, when I released Bower Lodge I gave a slight discount to people who preordered two copies, and had special enamel moth pins made as a complimentary gift. These were very popular, and so I am pleased to say that we’re doing this again. For every two hardcover copies of The Locust Years you preorder directly from Wiseblood Books, you will recieve both a 20% discount AND a beautiful free metal-and-enamel pin of the Locust from the book’s cover as an added thank you (while supplies last, of course).
It’s a souvenir for us, a souvenir of now, and the ideal of eaten hope that is at the core of this book.
You also can preorder a single copy of the book here if you want. (But isn’t there a birthday or something you’d like to get out of the way early with a nice little hardback book of fresh poetry?)
From the publisher (note the amazing choice of font—”The Doves” in particular):
The interior of this book is lush and rich, full of profoundly meaningful verse. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, The Locust Years invites readers to walk along a path pebbled with profound joy and deep loss. Pastor’s contemplation of the strange and wondrous happenings of the natural world and devoted attention to the human experience are chronicled in language worthy of our journey through this life. And so, the answer to this question was straightforward: a resounding yes!
Next question: How can we do justice to the words?
We knew the font for The Locust Years needed to be special and so we chose Doves Type by Robert Green, a British type designer. (Read the fascinating story of the legendary Doves Press typeface upon which Robert based his digital facsimile HERE and his process to revivify this typeface for the modern age HERE). This gorgeous type is meant to mimic letterpress type with its depth and softness. This font is both ethereal and grounded and represents essential elements of both Paul’s work and our ethos here at Wiseblood.
There will be lots of ways that you can help support the project. Sharing it with others, in person or online, is the main one. If you like the book, read something from it to someone. Write a consumer review and publish it on your favorite platform. Write a full review and pitch it to a good publication. Request it for your local library, suggest it for a book club, give your copy away on a whim and buy two more. Give it to your priest or pastor or barista or whoever needs a little thank you.
Writing is important, but a book only lives as it is read. You are the one who will make this book live. I hope you will plan now to help me find ways to bring this very special book out with integrity, joy, and real traction in a noisy, crowded, and stressful marketplace of ideas. Thank you, sincerely, in advance.
About The Locust Years
This book was born out of hard things. I will be more forthcoming here than I generally am, as Emily and I are extremely protective of our children’s privacy—to the point of not sharing their photos or their names in easily accessible public settings. So you can understand my reticence to say much more than the fact that our parenting has required navigating serious and unique health challenges that have made parenting our kids anything but simple.
I am very careful with the word “traumatic,” as I think it is overused in our culture. But it is the right one to describe the many years of the particular kinds of confusion, stress, medical and psychological needs, acute episodes of difficulty, and long-term effects that have fundamentally shaped our family life. None of this was anyone’s fault. (“Who sinned, this man or his parents?”) But we have each and all had to carry it, and often have felt crushed by the weight of it.
The experience has asked everything of us. More than everything. More than we had to give. We have been, at various times, all eaten up. It has been the source of a particular and unusual sort of grief, one which we have had to learn to carry. Part of that is making peace with “the locust,” which in this book represents those things which by their nature eat what is beloved to us, yet set the stage for a larger, harsher mercy.
Joy is abundant through it all of course. So is beauty, and laughter. But there is a real sense that the past decade-plus was, in a terrible and irreplaceable way, eaten. Devoured. Just like that. During one of the very darkest times, some years back, I sat and began to write:
My son, there is no fairness in the years,
No paid deserving. Nothing but the gift
Gone forth, gone sideways...
The poem that resulted, titled “The Locust Years,” was published by Presence Journal, and over the years has had many more than the usual number of people who have gone out of their way to say something kind about it. I will remember it because it was the first piece of writing, for a very long time, in which I wept while writing it. (Tears for me are getting easier, but for many years were quite walled-up.) From there, more writing began to come, poems that felt that they were kindred to that first, of the “world” of that first.
That world—the world of this book—is mine, but also separate from it. It is a world of symbol and sacrament—a world, like that of a fable, where little things are much weightier than they look. I found that the form of the poems, their voice, was being shaped by a sort of over-tone, a governing sound of a child’s poetry. I heard Blake sometimes. I heard Housman and Stevenson and Silverstein and Rosetti and Langston Hughes, and e. e. cummings. More than any of them though, I heard me.
The book is divided into four parts that correspond with the recurring seasons. In form, it is far more metrical than my first collection, with more than a few traditional sonnets, and many clearly formal poems. There is some blank and free verse as well. It collects the best of my short poetry from these past few years as a bounty from that time, and a sort of manifesto of honest hope about it all.
The art, by acclaimed British Neo-Romantic artist Michael Cook, is exceptional. Michael’s talent, soulfulness, and generosity of spirit are remarkable. I have been a fan of his work for years, and to work with him is a dream. I have been deeply honored by his belief in my work and his excitement to partner with me (I don’t think it’s a betrayal of confidence to share that he also shed good tears in the making of the work). We worked to capture Oregon through a uniquely English lens, as the poetic register and tradition which emerged here is so rooted in the English devotional poets and those whose worked was definitively shaped by them.
I found myself wanting to achieve a directness and simplicity in this work that dispensed with as much pretension as I could recognize. This was because what suffering does, if it is real and lasts long enough, is to help us dispense with pretension. I had to say something on these pages, had to try to get the joy, the meaning, the goodness of a certain kind of struggle that ends in resignation, that ends in reconciliation and peace. All I knew to do was to try to say the thing simply. There is no fairness in the years. And yet—the gift.
It is as gift that I hope you read and recieve it. You suffer too. I know it. All of us do. We are all eaten, in our way, sooner or later. Finding peace with this—and the spiritual abundance that comes not despite this inner famine but because of it—is a key part of the work of our lives. It is a great part of my own search for spiritual simplicity, and goodness and directness of form in my life and words. I fail at all of it, daily, and yet even in that failure I am lifted up. You can be too, I really believe it.
That title poem, in which a father and a son press cider as part of a long reunion, and as a waypoint to a beloved deathbed, opened something in my heart.
I believe that this is worth sharing with you, and I hope that you will enjoy and deeply connect with The Locust Years when it publishes in May.
I made it for you. Will you join me in these pages?
"There is no fairness in the years. And yet—the gift."--Yes, this is what all who suffer with Christ find.
Paul, the new collection looks beautiful. Congrats, sir!