Wicked City Hymnal
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iii.9 \n\na cipher that was never latent\nclicking, hissing\nshifting its weight it sat in the corner in wait\nand waited. And then it was too late. it knew my name before I could say it \nmy name was always for rent Regardless the music,\nRegardless the language,\nRegardless the nation,\nRegardless the steady machinery of explanation, but the watchword (or is it love?) is patient. It gathers like dust.\nLike rust.\nLike trust. Settling into the cracks\nbetween the attacks of the old\nand what can be told. some nights it sounded\nlike distant traffic \nlike if there was a siren on a hearse some nights it sounded\nlike God clearing His throat\nshibboleth \nshe wrote to settle a score most nights\nit sounded like nothing at all,\nwhich was somehow worse because nothing has a way of becoming more A blank becomes a space.\nA space becomes a room.\nA room becomes a home. for every unfinished thing\nleft alone\n\nauto-pilot was my home iii.12\n \nSilence is loud. People think silence is the absence of sound,\nbut silence is the absence of certainty. A different thing entirely. The moment the noise stops,\nthe work begins. Silence asks questions.\nSilence makes suggestions. Silence hands you a missing piece\nand waits to see what shape\nyou will carve around it. I have watched silence turn shadows\ninto warnings. Watched it turn strangers\ninto judges. Watched it take a closed door\nand build a story behind it,\nbrick by brick. Silence loves an empty field. It seeds it. Immediately. Relentlessly. With ghosts.\nWith gods.\nWith debts.\nWith names. Especially names. By the time the truth arrives,\nsilence has already finished speaking. The room is crowded.\nThe seats are taken.\nThere is nowhere left to put it.\n\nThere is a word for this. It does not occur here.
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About the Book
Meaning lost, not recovered. Evidence of meaning remains. Wicked City Hymnal is a collection of poems about language, devotion, memory, bureaucracy, and the systems people build to make sense of what cannot be fully understood. Structured as seven interconnected movements — Invocation, Devotion, Self-Erasure, Rot / Death / Consequence, Language Failure, Wicked City, and Aftermath — the collection moves through sonnets, villanelles, hymns, fragments, prose, and free verse, allowing form itself to become part of the search for meaning. Saints, lovers, bureaucrats, prophets, ghosts, performers, translators, and cities inhabit the same landscape. Silence generates its own narratives. Administrative language becomes liturgy. Love becomes contract. Memory becomes archaeology. Throughout the collection, the ordinary and the mythic continually exchange places. At its heart, Wicked City Hymnal asks how meaning survives when certainty does not. It is less interested in recovering what has been lost than in examining the traces that remain, and the stories we build from them.
About the Author
Christine Svensson is a Swedish-American poet living in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work explores devotion, memory, language, identity, grief, and the stories people create to survive them. Drawing on influences ranging from mythology and religion to formal verse, contemporary poetry, and lived experience, she writes across forms including sonnets, villanelles, haiku, fragments, and hybrid works. She is the author of the haiku collection Paid in Salt. When she is not reading or writing poetry, she is usually suffering the desert sun.