Questions About God

Stephen Perry’s poems feature many diverse voices, whose odd points-of-view often deconstruct themselves, like many of Nabokov’s peculiar protagonists, and they’re are often as droll and hilarious. Complex, unreliable narrators are rare in poetry, but even rarer is Perry’s range of subject matter, drawing on philosophy, science, history, etymology, archeology, psychology, poetry, sexuality, music, etc., in fact anything of human interest. He combines a wide range of world mythologies—from Greek to Judeo-Christian, from Hindu to Buddhist, even flirting with American Indian Blackfoot lore—coalescing all into a kind of monomyth, a synthesis of science and myth. It is a celebration of the natural world. The perspective is wholly humanist, of interest to skeptics and agnostics and atheists and all those who distain the absurdities, crudities, and cruelties of a simplistic fundamentalist mindset. If Bart D. Ehrman’s "God’s Problem" had been written in verse, this would be it.