The World Before Grace (...and after): The Ladder of the Beatitudes

My new book based on the 14 Stations of the Cross, is out from Wiseblood Books. Click to order

"Herman Sutter’s Stations rejects the consolations of sentiment. His language is spare and oblique, requiring of the reader the imaginative askesis necessary to enter the realities of the Way of the Cross. Look at Simon of Cyrene, famous for helping carry the instrument of torture, but here not a hero, merely a man terrified of the Romans and now in his old age dimly aware of what he missed. Sutter’s Veronica is not an aristocratic lady graciously proffering her kerchief to a suffering man, but a grotesque woman—stooped, cleft-tongued, mocked by children, incapable of speech until 'the stain upon the rag' burns her wail into word. What did it sound like when the soldiers were throwing dice to see who got Jesus’s clothes? What does it feel like for a young soldier to nail a man to a cross for the first time? Sutter takes us deeper than we would have gone. These poems come out of real suffering and disillusionment with the lies we tell ourselves, and for that very reason they are a profound entry onto the Via Dolorosa." —Glenn Arbery, author of Why Literature Matters

The World Before Grace (...and after)

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