Homo

By Joseph F Edwards

HOMO: A Long Poem
by Joe Edwards

Homo is a rare and extraordinary achievement in American poetry - a long poem fifty years in the making, published by Cara Press (2024), that dares to ask the oldest questions: What is humanity? What is truth? What is the relationship between the animal and the divine?

Spanning two parts and dozens of sections, Homo moves with breathtaking range - from the gritty vernacular of a desperate Appalachian husband shouting "Put some WOOD on that fire " to the soaring philosophical heights of Hawkness, where the poet sheds every social identity and dives, hawk-like, into the pure moment of poetic being. Along the way, the poem gives us an unforgettable old man - hunter, wanderer, storyteller, sage - whose quiet death in a moonlit forest is one of the most moving passages in contemporary American poetry.

Homo is at once a meditation on time, a celebration of civilization, a reckoning with grief and loss, a parable about providence, and a hymn to the divine in all things - in cows and fences, in smooth sailing and hassles, in the rock and the bird and the wind and the stars.

Written in the tradition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Williams' Paterson, and Hopkins' Pied Beauty, Homo is a poem that has been genuinely lived in. It is raw, honest, philosophically ambitious, and - in its best moments - genuinely beautiful.

ISBN: 978-0-9836530-4-2
Publisher: Cara Press (2024)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0983653046
• ISBN13: 9780983653042
• Release Date: October 2024
• Publisher: Cara Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 8.0"