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Let Your Heart Be Troubled: Poems

Let Your Heart Be Troubled: Poems
Product Code: P748
ISBN: 9798897360338
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LET YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED is Judson Mitcham's first collection of poems in twenty years. It takes as its epigraph Paul Valéry's description of language as "the god gone astray in the flesh." These poems engage a single life and many lives at once, moving toward what is here called soul, traveling a path laid down by a lexicon of plain words. This is a collection that should reward opening the book at random, but it is structured so that it may also be read as the scaffolding of a narrative. The history it begins with is American history; the soul at the end of its path is an American soul. The lexicon's journey is orderly, but the language does go astray: it changes tone; it offers a fluid music plus lines so thickly textured as to raise a racket; it revels in vernacular speech; it amuses itself; it plays at irony and keeps moving toward an end. The poems address family and the loss of family; faith and the loss of faith; race and human failure; the Christ-haunted South; the passing of time. Many of these poems were written during the author's tenure as poet laureate of Georgia. "Prayer" was delivered at The Funeral for 13,000, Andersonville Historic Site, September 19, 2015. "Sadness" and "Praise" served as benedictions at the Governor's Awards in the Arts and Humanities.
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Reviews

Review by: Kevin Cantwell, author of TAKEOUT KITCHEN BELOW THE PERSEUS CLUSTER - June 11, 2026
"Weighty and clear as glass, these new Judson Mitcham poems strike a wry humor within a voice puzzled and angered by the contradictions of a troubled world. He is a master of tone and the sharp asides drawn from human failure. Although Mitcham shows great tenderness for family, the human heart elsewhere is not so easily picked apart in his immensely important poems. LET YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED proves again how important Judson Mitcham is to American literature, and how he steps into the light as one of the two or three most persuasive writers on race in Georgia letters."
Review by: Gordon Johnston, professor of Creative Writing, Mercer University, and author of WHERE "HERE" IS HARD TO SAY - June 11, 2026
"These are stunning poems, in voices that mesmerize, amuse, confess, and confront. Judson Mitcham is in discerning conversation with his former selves, recombining stanzas from earlier poems to weave startling new narratives. He delightfully engages the poems and ideas of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and others, in whose company he belongs. I haven't read a better, more inventive collection."

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