Winner of the 2005 Nightboat Poetry Prize

Glean, a reference to the gathering of grain after harvest, explores the appalling trust implicit in any act of faith — that prayer may not elicit a response. Spare and evocative, the collection struggles with a language at odds with itself. How do we write about an absence that can never be fully possessed or known, an absence that may be all we ever glimpse of the divine? When does spirituality become more real than its pursuit? Moving between doubt and vulnerability, the body and its unresolved spiritual fate, these poems dedicate themselves to the pursuit of redemption.

"In these tight and resonant lyrics, logic, precision, and affection coalesce. Like prayer that needs nothing to pray to, these poems continually open, enlarging our view."
— Cole Swensen, author of Goest and The Book of a Hundred Hands

"Kryah’s words shift with an electric resiliency created by a mysterious energy, leading us to the door of enthrallment."
— Bei Dao, author of Unlock and The August Sleepwalker

"After we've reaped the whirlwind, what remains to glean? This debut approaches the question and its quiet apocalypse not desperately but, against all precedent, lovingly. In Glean we have the love poetry of a terrible aftermath we need not, thanks to Kryah, fear after all."
— Donald Revell, author of Arcady and My Mohave

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