We Deserve the Gods We Ask For

Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award, "We Deserve the Gods We Ask For" traverses the space between the hero and the hero who has been left behind. Tucker chases the concept of what it is to be a hero (and expands his deep printed footsteps in war literature) by interspersing this collection with persona narratives of soldiers and veterans while deftly managing the comedic and surreal in his investigations of comic heroes like Wile E. Coyote and Popeye. This second poetry collection by Seth Brady Tucker won the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Gival Poetry editors prize as well as several other post-publication awards.

The poems in this collection investigate the role of the hero and how our culture abandons them once they have been used up. Tucker's poems blends myth, memory, and the raw edges of the lived veteran experience that feel both timeless and urgently contemporary. Tucker writes with a rare combination of narrative power and lyrical precision, moving effortlessly between the sacred and the profane as he interrogates the stories we inherit and the gods—literal and metaphorical—we create to survive them.

These poems are alive with humor, grit, and emotional intelligence. Tucker gives voice to our heroic belief systems, even as he tears them down through poems that range from the battlefields of Iraq to the deep lonely underwater lair of Aquaman.

"I loved Seth Brady Tucker's first book, Mormon Boy, and I love this one more. Whether he is speaking of (as) Wile E. Coyote metaphorically, or speaking as a man who jumped out of airplanes (not for fun) and fired and was fired upon, or when he is speaking his remarkable love poems, you know you are hearing (I'm purposefully using 'speaking' and 'hearing'

instead of writing and reading) something authentic, and true."

—Thomas Lux, author of God Particles and Split Horizon

"The poems in Seth Brady Tucker's We Deserve The Gods We Ask For are acrobatic and epic and make me happy that poetry is still a place where we can re-envision the old questions about life and the spirit. In the book, I hear echoes of our great American masters, like Ashbery, Hemingway, Plath, Merwin, and Stein, infused in a new voice with the rhetorical bravado of a 100 swallows swarming the forest, 1000 preachers booming the word of the soul, and 10,000 conductors of a never-ending symphony of being that extends from this world into the next. Bravo to this poet, who tells us so nonchalantly it is: 'God here. As in big G God. As in, listen up.' Listen up. Read this book."

—Dorothea Lasky, author of ROME

"Through these poems echo the vibrations/of bare feet on hollow concrete... /at first like children at play, /and then like children at war, / and then feet shuffling in blood. Seth Brady Tucker writes of cartoon heroes, soldiers, lost brothers, new lovers, and undying ghosts with humor, pathos, wit, and remorse. The poems in We Deserve the Gods We Ask For want to break your heart. If you let them, they will."

— Camille T. Dungy, author of Smith Blue

"This book is nothing less than amazing!" — CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE

"This is sinewy writing at its most sturdy and tenacious. His tangle of silk and muscle is sure to stagger and transfix."

— Lisa Graley, Gival Press Poetry Award judge and author of Box of Blue Horses