Another Psalm

The poems in Bill Schulz's Another Psalm are contemplative and graceful elegies, prayers and songs--invocations for what has been lost, for what has been remembered, for what cannot be replaced. I was transformed by this collection as grief evolves into beauty and then into joy. --Elizabeth Jacobson, author of Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air and the forthcoming There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral

In Bill Schulz's Another Psalm, self-forgiveness is not a solitary achievement. Like a leaf falling to the ground on a gentle breeze, we bear witness to his reminiscing and grief in the same way the little bird in his back yard fills the trees with song, both melancholy and aspirational. "I have freed god / from the capital letter," he writes, presiding over his past and deciding that regret is inevitable, but a deity is not. In these poems, "a blue heron in a thin mist," an ice pond beside the house he built long ago, a hawk, two crows, the virtual assistant "Alexa," and a sister crying over the phone, intercede, in chorus, for his thriving.

-Kimberly Ann Priest, Winner of the 2024 Backwater's Press Prize in Poetry, University of Nebraska

The poems in Bill Schulz's Another Psalm are as unlike "another" as possible-they're spiritually adept, original, and altogether necessary in the way of the psalter. One may say the reader of Schulz's poems becomes an intercessor-we feel acutely that we're receiving and soon will bear good news. These poems are clear as Russian tea in a glass, clarifying in their attention to the smallest things, and tinged with the loving kindness of imagination.

-Stephen Kuusisto