Kiss the Earth When You Pray: The Father Zosima Poems

This collection of poems explores the confounding, restless joy of encountering the Holy; Father Zosima speaks of the elemental Love that surrounds us and the mystery that is closer to us than the air we breathe.

Robert Hudson has that quality, all too rare in evangelicalism, of embracing mystery and thus giving his readers that freedom.

—Philip Yancey, author, Where Is God When It Hurts? and What’s So Amazing about Grace?

If poets are “orators of the imagination” (Wallace Stevens), this immaculate collection from Robert Hudson is story oratory that stirs two kinds of imagination: the visual imagination of the human, the domain of dreams; and the invisible imagination of the divine, that flies us beyond the stars.  

—Leonard Sweet, bestselling author, Bad Habits of Jesus, professor (Drew University, George Fox University, Tabor College)

Spare, even austere in their music and language, these elegant poems have their source in the imagination and wisdom of the Desert Fathers. The vision embodied in them is a vision of wholeness and hope. Warmly funny (some made me laugh out loud) and profoundly serious, they are poems I will be treasuring and reading for the rest of my life.

—John Leax, author, Tabloid News and Recluse Freedom

Achingly beautiful, these whispered words are embers, falling, rising. Then WHAM, I am staggered by their power. I will read this book again. I will send it to friends for special occasions and for just because. They too will read it again.

—Drema Hall Berkheimer, author, Running on Red Dog Road