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The epigraph to Emma Lou Thayne’s book Things Happen from Alice Walker reads: “One wants to write poetry that is understood by one’s people.” In the same spirit, I want to write to my people about a poet, one of our own, whose poems I believe stand among the finest. Some of these poems I read when they were published ten or more years ago; one, “Love Song at the End of Summer,” has stayed with me all those intervening years, shaping both my readerly and writerly consciousness with its heartbreaking grace. In order to address what I take to be a crucial ontological issue in lyric poetry, Emma Lou Thayne’s in particular, I want to set up a rubric, and to do that I need to talk about my own studies of, and concerns about, the lyric. 

Joseph Smith’s revision of the Pauline closing, “world without end” (Eph. 3:21) to become “worlds without end” (D&C 76:112), is a significant ontological move. Specifically, Smith’s closing provides an opening for contemporary Mormon literature to…

As Latter-day Saints, we are under obligation to fulfill three specific missions: perfecting the saints, spreading the gospel, and redeeming the dead. As LDS writers, we add a particular covenant and mission to “the word…

Consider the Restoration of the gospel as a paradigm for Mormon criticism. Sensing some apostasy from truth, the critic rectifies this falling away through an act of restoration. As Joseph Smith sensed something incomplete about…

The first example of what could be called a Mormon short story was written by an apostle, Parley P. Pratt. It was published in the New York Herald on January 1, 1844, and collected in…