Gospels From the Lower Shelf by Thomas Dukes

When Tom Dukes calls himself an “old southern queen / with poodle, the love child of Liberace / and Flannery O’Connor,” he’s both funny and right, though there’s much more to him than that. His has been a life triangulated by family in South Carolina, friends from his college days in Texas, and those mature years of settling into Ohio. He has the southerner’s knack for storytelling, often about Mama and Daddy and his permissive Aunt Ruby who used to say, “Sometimes God goes out for a smoke.” He also has what all poets crave: a gift for indelible beginnings and endings that hit the sweet spot, as in his poem “Red Onions” that starts “They put the day on its feet” and ends with “I need this Old Testament fruit, / The peculiar charity of its taste.” We come from his poems fully satisfied by their grace and wry humor and a poignancy that has gone on too long for tears: “I live in the kingdom / Of the haunted and the grateful, / Keeping my ghosts in line.”

–Elton Glaser

Tom Dukes, “southern queen with poodle, the love child of Liberace and Flannery O’Connor,” takes us on a beautiful pilgrimage of faith, family, life. His travels show us Southern places of the heart, the borderland of El Paso, and his adopted Ohio landscapes. I read each poem and want immediately to reread it. I already love Tom’s writing, and the vividness of his language. This is a top-shelf collection that I’ll turn to again and again.

–Paul Stroble, Webster University

You don’t have to be born and raised Baptist in the deep south with Mama crying over sins she didn’t commit and Daddy full of the Old Testament to put your faith in these exuberant, inspired, love-soaked poems. Tom Dukes not only considers the lily but also Carolina hydrangeas with heads big as planets, sewing-circle widows making crochet out of chaos, Tibetan prayer flags flapping between Ohio barns like God’s laundry, and the saving graces of insulin, Daddy’s Army latex lessons, holy infidelities, and outlaw marriage. In a voice full of empathy and wit, even elegies become odes to being alive in a world of ruptures, raptures, and unexpected charity. These gospels will make both saints and sinners say Amen!

–Lynn Powell, Season of the Second Thought