Sunk in Your Shipwreck

Sunk in Your Shipwreck is a collection of poems that employs the trope of the pilgrimage to structure its meanderings, especially (in murky and unfaithful ways) echoing the great medieval English poem, Piers Plowman. Moving through a poem from beginning to end is itself a kind of pilgrimage in the mind and on the tongue. The poems here reflect a late modern palmering, a movement from place to place and time to time and back again, movement through language and silence, inner and outer states, contemplative and active, starting and stopping, a longing for a constant or a destination in a life of uncertain circumstances and goals. In this verse peregrination, the palmer seeks out an illuminating and sustaining vision to form and transform common surroundings and moments of human life, a pursuit that is hopeful and darkly radiant by turns.

Jacob Riyeff teaches in the English department at Marquette University. He is the translator of St. Æthelwold's Old English Rule of St. Benedict (2017) and In the Bosom of the Father, the collected poems of Swami Abhishiktananda (2018). Jacob is a Benedictine oblate of Osage Deanery.