Driving the Beast

Christopher Bakken is the author of three previous books of poetry and the culinary memoir Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table. Twice a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches at Allegheny College and serves as director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos.

"Driving the Beast is an epic pilgrimage through underworlds of myth and memory. From the legend-riven islands of Greece to the American heartland, Christopher Bakken confronts mortality, history, and the passage of time in poems as unsparing as they are luminous." - Jane Satterfield "A theologian of sensuosity, a memoirist refusing nostalgia, a seer, Bakken offers us the shards of experience that somehow, almost, never quite, and yet still might put our broken world back together again." - Alan Michael Parker "Driving the Beast offers an esoteric theology, one that trusts hunger as revelation, as nudge, as indicator of where the pilgrim ought to go and how the pilgrim might hope to proceed." - Scott Cairns "Not surprising for a poet who has spent time interrogating the ancients and inhabiting the modern cities they bequeathed us, Bakken composes ritual songs that point past the surfaces of experience to what is both mysterious and essential." - David Yezzi