2022 Test Site Poetry Prize winner 

In poems both personal and historical, The Dove of the Morning News explores conceptions of collectivity, inflected by each psyche, as a force of both connection and division.  In its look at tribalism and systemic cruelty as rooted in shame, dread, and insecurity, the book seeks a better understanding of how power needs, spurred by communities of hatred, weaponize the brain’s tendencies to think in animated figures, caricatures, erasures, or, as in the book’s mediation on vellum, texts written across the bodies of others.

As a lens into contemporary life, the title sequence interrogates the vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose sense of our increasingly interwoven cultural conversation figures now as a premonition of the internet.  If his hope for the noosphere as a fulfillment of divine promise feels problematic, it nonetheless sees our globe as an organism whose long-term survival depends on the capacity of each to forge friendship across difference, to take the health and integration of the individual as emblematic of the whole.

In The Sound of the Dove, Beverly Bush Patterson explores one of the oldest traditions of American religious folksong: unaccompanied congregational singing in the Primitive Baptist churches of Appalachia. Using interviews, field observations, historical research, song transcriptions, and musical analysis, Patterson explores the dynamic relationship between singing and theology in these churches, the genesis of their musical practices, and the unexpectedly significant role of women in their conservative congregations.