Poetry. CHURCH OF NEEDLES dwells in the tension between our desire for autonomy and our need for connection; with each other, with our own mercurial selves, with god. If the poems circle a place of alienation, where even the landscape appears aloof if not hostile, where the bond between a mother and her newborn isn't a given, they often arrive at redemption, but a curiously godless one. Threaded through poems of darkness, of abuse, betrayal, witness and hardship, god is merciless when present, but more often obstinately absent. The voices of a ridiculed small town giantess, the abused wife of a Civil War veteran and a former slave making her way in the north dialogue with contemporary voices telling their own stories of suffering. Loneliness, like an Andrew Wyeth landscape, is the familiar ground on which these characters have built their lives, not counting on but surprised by unexpected grace.<br /> <br />"Perhaps the secret to adult prayer has been this: the more concrete its particularities, the greater possibility of its actually being heard. If there is such thing as secular prayer, prayers that have accrued weight by welcoming worldly shadows both personal and collective, chewing on them, digesting them, before integrating them into our conscious existence, then that is what Sarah Sousa has accomplished here, sinking deep into the muck to work a spiritual aesthetic of a very high order."—Timothy Liu