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A review by brice_mo
Prayers of My Youth by F.S. Yousaf
3.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Andrews McNeel Publishing for the ARC!
F.S. Yousaf’s Prayers of My Youth is a lovely, warm, and wide-eyed collection of devotional poems.
Most of these pieces revolve around the speaker’s relationship to the Divine, though a few wade into romantic love. Regardless of the subject matter, every poem feels defined by a courageous and hard-won tenderness.
Instead of the anguish that dictates many spiritual poems, Yousaf shares a faith that allows him to write soft and simple poems. They carry the quietude of someone reading over you as you rub the sleep from your eyes.
That isn’t to say that this is a one-note collection.
There are moments of life’s ugliness that break through, as seen in “Devastation—,“ but they serve to deepen the book’s spirituality. We can feel the speaker making a conscious decision to pursue abstraction when life resists it.
In the end, Prayers of My Youth feels like a little book with a muscular humility—the kind that allows for worship.
F.S. Yousaf’s Prayers of My Youth is a lovely, warm, and wide-eyed collection of devotional poems.
Most of these pieces revolve around the speaker’s relationship to the Divine, though a few wade into romantic love. Regardless of the subject matter, every poem feels defined by a courageous and hard-won tenderness.
Instead of the anguish that dictates many spiritual poems, Yousaf shares a faith that allows him to write soft and simple poems. They carry the quietude of someone reading over you as you rub the sleep from your eyes.
That isn’t to say that this is a one-note collection.
There are moments of life’s ugliness that break through, as seen in “Devastation—,“ but they serve to deepen the book’s spirituality. We can feel the speaker making a conscious decision to pursue abstraction when life resists it.
In the end, Prayers of My Youth feels like a little book with a muscular humility—the kind that allows for worship.