Dark Church, designed by Quemadura.

Dark Church, designed by Quemadura.

JOSEPH DONAHUE

DARK CHURCH

Keeping vigil through the night in the realm of the Terra Lucida, which, according to Islamic scholar Henry Corbin, is “the land that secretes its own light,” Joseph Donahue’s Dark Church lures a pilgrim. Fraught with memories of modernity and childhood, he aspires to stand in the temple where ritual adherents drowse in dreams of healing and oracular pronouncements intimate a destiny belonging both to this world and the next, and whose visions emanate from Dallas, from Gethsemane, and from Istanbul. “Long ago, / the truest part of you … / began to approach / the condition of stone.” At once vatic, nostalgic, cryptic, and clear, Dark Church is a book of unremitting visionary power.

ISBN 978-0-9889885-2-1

$20