Phyllis Tickle May Kill You

I’ve taken a week off from writing my own book on the atonement to edit the chapters of the forthcoming book, Phyllis Tickle: Evangelist of the Future. One of the beautiful and surprising aspects of the book to many readers is sure to be the lengthy, anotated bibliography of Phyllis’s published books, compiled by Kelly Pigott.

To those of us who’ve only gotten two know Phyllis in the past decade or two, her earlier career as a Latin professor, art teacher, and college dean is virtually unknown to us. Plus, she was (is?) a poet, and a helluva good one. She has several published collections. Here’s one stanza that Kelly highlights in the bibliography, published in 1983 (when I was in 10th grade):

Someday I will shoot you
Between the bedrooms and the kitchen door;
Or I will write a poem
That leaves you bleeding there.

Um, yeah, remind me not to get on Tickle’s bad side.