Was That You Boss
Praise for
“J. Stephen Rhodes is a fearless poet who dares to write with irony, humor, and humility about the wild, inscrutable God who is Boss. Reading him, one catches glimpses of an actual unposed devout life wrestling with the One who delights in our wrestling. His images are often wry, ironic displays of human spirit that are thoroughly enfleshed.”
—Roy Howard, Presbyterian minister and book editor at the Presbyterian Outlook
"Steve Rhodes’s poetic sequence Boss begins, “I went walking in the marsh / Boss the one with live oaks / dead pines cypress knees,’ sweeping us into a spiritual journey that is field guide, psalter, cry and song. This opening poem wonders ‘was that you Boss / beneath cypress and tupelo.’ In compact lines stripped to the essential, this human voice bluntly addresses a God who is elusive, mysterious, even bewildering, a trickster God whom the speaker knows to be the steadiest of companions.”
– Suzanne Cleary, author of Crude Angel