An Atheist's Book of Prayers

America exists in collapsing waves of witnessed probability in Bishop’s stunning and honest An Atheist’s Book of Prayers; this fabled nation is forced through the lenses of a voice grappling with irreconcilable realities that somehow persist side by side. These prayers come from a body that insists on its own beauty trapped in a nation that insists on its own ugliness, from delicate words, images, and sounds strewn about the pages to hollow out enough space for its own America, its own religion, safe from the raging world. This collection is everything I’d expect from an Appalachian who cares for his home enough to interrogate it — full of heart, tenderness, regret, love, and a persistent thread of thin hope woven from encounters with the overlooked.

—Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr., author, Gay Poems for Red States

Wesley R. Bishop’s An Atheist’s Book of Prayers is a book about America, though much more in the vein of Hughes’s “I, too, sing America” than Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” Bishop’s poems are songs that invoke abortion, Walmart, violence, religion, and the spaces in which these topics intersect. More than simply focusing on a country’s ills, however, this collection explores how our stories and songs of a place both construct it and have the power to envision another world, a better Alabama, a more just America that may not be America at all. An Atheist’s Book of Prayers is Bishop’s timely prayer not to gods, but to humanity.

—Jessica Cory, editor, Appalachian Journal