Pluck

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About This Title

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A former pastor reckons with fallout when a lifetime of religious practice intersects with a modern life that’s messier than doctrine allows. What happens when old certainties are no longer certain? What is left when we take off the old clothes that used to keep us warm, but no longer fit?

Pluck is a book-length meditation on what wrestling with faith—or its inverse—looks like.

In his 5th poetry collection, Adam Hughes uses a conversational approach to share his own all-too-human personal experiences while pulling back layers of his life, loves, and his relationship to the religion that shaped him. “I want to be known perfectly and loved anyway,” is the cry of the author, as is the acceptance of doubt, disbelief, and drift.

A pursuit of authenticity and a coming to terms with doubt, this book is for all of those who are fellow G(g)od wrestlers, doubters, the restless and dissatisfied, for those who are tired of old certainties and structures that have long since broken down around them.

Praise for Pluck

"Pluck addresses the divine at eye-level, a daring conceit but one that helps us re-imagine (perhaps even rejoice) our proximity to grace while on the rocky path called life. Adam Hughes’ poems have given us an extraordinary gift: a new language—spiritual, nuanced, and achingly beautiful—with which to tell our stories, converse with God, and pray.” —Rigoberto González, author of To the Boy Who Was Night

"I am so moved by Adam Hughes’ Pluck, so activated by its searching excavations of faith and manhood and God. ‘I forgive you for the foolishness with which you’ve forgiven me,’ Hughes writes to a capital-G God in whom he can muster only an imperfect faith, but to whom he can’t stop talking in gorgeous, rending, and sneakily quite funny verse. I’m in awe. Pluck enters into a kind of lyric lover’s quarrel with the divine, a tradition dating back to David’s Psalms (or even Enheduanna before him), and passing through Aquinas and Donne and Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets. St. John of the Cross, who wrote the original dark night of the soul, reminds us: ‘In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.’ This is a book about the long dark nights, yes, but it’s also about sticking around—by whatever means—to see the light." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

Excerpt from Pluck [Page 34]

the moon looks
like a cigarette
burn on a thigh

I knew a woman
who had perfect
circles all down

her leg from
a parent’s cigarette
a neat line

from groin to knee
some days
I wonder if I can

love—life
is a fire
burning itself

out—a flame
consuming
all the fuel

its living
a quickening
unto death

a communion
with no
remembrance

only the pain
of this is my body
broken