Mark McHugh

Praise the Tainted Trinity: 40 Poems of Love and Grief Mark McHugh

Praise the Tainted Trinity tracks the journey of a turbulent relationship, offering poetic snapshots of a couple's love and deterioration, and the speaker's reckoning of grief and impending fatherhood. Beginning with a proud declaration of survival, the subsequent poems depict the small blisses of romantic love. The narrative then slides into the crumbling of the relationship, and proceeds to portray the grief of the speaker, as well as the insoluble motives of the speaker's lover. Later, an unborn child is introduced, adding new layers and dimensions to the speaker's sense of loss and dislocation. By the end of the book, the speaker reckons with the complexity and pain of his situation, depicting a medley of acceptance, hope, and enduring love.

The collection as a whole grazes that which makes life both meaningful and unbearable, depicting the "bliss-blessed" highs, the unfathomable lows, and the "thickness of the in-between". The book will appeal to casual readers with its emotional and relatable narrative, as well as the more studious readers of poetry, who will delight in the lyricism, allusions, and metaphors.
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