Allow the Stars to Catch Me When I Rise, the third collection of poetry from Adam Hughes, takes the reader on a mystical journey; a pilgrimage. Found in these pages is life in all of its variety and seduction. This collection is a sea-net, a constellation, an archipelago of dreams, hopes, disappointments, questions, and above all, the beauty both terrible and holy that walks beside each of us every moment of our lives.
“In Allow the Stars to Catch Me When I Rise, Adam Hughes reminds us of the connection between poetry and prayer—the meditative attentiveness to family, to place, and to the mind at work. These are poems that seek and question. What is sacred? The horses “waiting patiently for the stars to fall / so they might eat them off the tips of the grass”? The stars throwing “down / their spears, littering / the world with their war”? The speaker singing “hallelujah / in the key of sparrow”? Yes, all of it—as we’re reminded, poem after poem. Like the world we live in, the world Hughes creates in this book is a profound gift.”
Maggie Smith, author of The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison
“There is a lot of work and beauty that takes place between the core of our domestic lives, and the always spinning celestial arcade above us. In Adam Hughes’ new collection, Allow the Stars to Catch Me When I Rise, I was brought face to face with the idea that those contrasting physical spaces might just take up the same emotional landscape within us. Each of Hughes’ tightly constructed, well-balanced poems reminded me that there is nothing common in a life this deeply considered, that though we might occasionally feel the rotations of our time, that doesn’t mean that we can’t find enough real joy to elevate our hearts into what feels like a heaven. I would highly recommend this collection of poems for anyone that wants to experience a system of tethers as lovingly rendered as the work in this book.”
Darren C. Demaree, author of Not for Art nor Prayer
“In this terrific collection, Adam Hughes takes us on a classic American road trip, with poems that cruise and gyre though the mountains and toward the horizons of our culture, making pit-stops at Midwestern barns and Wal-Mart bathrooms, football-championship celebrations and darkened highways—and always, always searching for faith and hope and love. But it’s isolated on that road, and this tender book has an undercurrent of sadness. It’s no surprise that D.B. Cooper is a recurring figure here: what is more American than vanishing into this vast and lonely landscape of ours? Hughes’ poems remind us of the distances between us—and then quietly offer us a bridge, holding open the possibility that someday we will find that grace we’ve long sought.”
Amorak Huey, author of Ha Ha Ha Thump
