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“As our urgent motivation, it is imperative that we compel our creativities to quell our existential nausea, dispel our ennui, and silence our angst. Nurtured creativity can overflood our drives for mere survival. Creativity allows us to discover resurrection.”
Featured Publication
In Grass That Leaves Greener, Shawn’s poetry is “a praise to the process of dialectical progress,” exploring the escapisms, the “eschatons and egresses,” of the human condition through his narratively developmental themes of existentialism, mythology, theology, hermeneutics, epic poetry, and other literary allusions.
From his acute thesis of tragic poetic works concerning “doom” to his antithetical themed lyrics–“undone”–that focus on interior deteriorations, Hays’s reorienting cycle–Grass That Leaves Greener–crests in its resilient synthesis, his surprising crescendo “doom undone,” “the tribal deaths that this triune I must die and die to be raised alive.”
Featured Press Author
Prolific Tennessean author and entrepreneur Shawn Callaway Hays materializes his passion to help his communities as a life safety educator and as an officer in emergency and rescue services. He received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and religion from the University of Tennessee. Follow Shawn Callaway Hays and his similar literary works at amazon.com/author/shawncallawayhays.
“Hays’s sculpted investigations—palpable, handsome, prescriptive—ensnare us in why we make our pilgrimages to the sublimating altar of art.”
“A collection of poetry that spans centuries but that remains fixed in a single moment.” – Kirkus Reviews
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RHP Testimonials
“rhythmical euphonic chants
utterly distilling a complete point of view,
a proverbial cacophony of honest tensions
that is meant to be heard”
“Anglican, analytic, scholarly … the messenger who imposes revelation to bring others into theophantic being, reinforcing their participation in community, binding them to their peers and ancestors, creating a drive to preserve traditions of orthopraxy so to be ready for existentialist propositions discerned.”
“Hays creates an environment that’s heavily influenced by the writing of poets that … forged our contemporary understanding of poetry. The book opens with ‘Inscriptions,’ … epigraphs, setting the tone for what’s to come—elegiac proclamations about the natural world, the oneness of man with nature, and the unpredictability of passion. … [T]he poet’s incorporation of epigraphs to launch his poems is … helpful to situate the persona’s framework. … Hays then divides his book into three sections. In ‘Great Are the Myths,’ he uses a series of references to explore what constitutes a literary character. … [R]eaders … navigate poems … like amorphous iterations of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. … The second section, ‘Song of Myself,’ spins off of Walt Whitman’s famous title to provide readers with a more contemporary voice that resonates for readers living today. … The work … shines in the … contemporary language of the second section, … ‘I scout the sky / for the approaching clouds, / our stoic supporting cast— / artists / staggering in with hangovers / after a hard day’s night / to droop around and glisten glib lines.’ … When the text gets more personal, … the poems burst with story. … Finally, the third section, ‘Song of the Answerer,’ functions as a reflection on love and how it helps shape identity and language. … A collection of poetry that spans centuries but that remains fixed in a single moment … (‘and it is none / that can live / and die and live / again / but man ungiving, / man, I, plantless’). … Hays’ project has promise.”
-Kirkus Reviews
“and always syntax that attacks
the mundane
the inane
finally fresh
yes”
RHP Literary Blog Posts
Kirkus Review for Featured RHP Publication
“Hays creates an environment that’s heavily influenced by the writing of poets that … forged our contemporary understanding of poetry. The book opens with ‘Inscriptions,’ … epigraphs, setting the tone for what’s to come—elegiac proclamations about the natural world, the oneness of man with nature, and the unpredictability of passion. … [T]he poet’s incorporation of epigraphs to launch his poems is … helpful to situate the persona’s framework. … Hays then divides his book into […]
banishing blacklisted, rebuked
to be forsaken and unset as from a form of Vishnu, his turning third Veda-face pivoting in a storm of Sanskrit terror to eradicate man asleep from Shiva-Rudra impending in heat and famine and waste; and Enough! Enough, because poetry arcing —Artistry—is our chance to rave returning, to reverse Indra’s rain, uncursed, to rant back like Furies unloosed as maddening whisper daggers slashing, being born from emasculation as maddening whisper daggers slashing, to reverse […]
RHP excerpt from Pooled Ink contest of Northern Colorado Writers
primal contentment like a burly elegant pirate behind an English mustache and gritty eye patch, Sir Adrian could summon little from The Book, abandoned in rubble, of Common Prayer to parry why he fought, why overlooking, one-eyed, at downtown London in Nazi shambles, steeping a dirty World War II tea bag on a broken veranda smoldering, Carton de Wiart self-knowing it was that he was there —England there— instead of another empire —always rising or […]