& Other Poems
Justin Lacour’s first full-length collection, A Season in Heck & Other Poems, chronicles the journey from suffering to joy. With a searing honesty and a resilient sense of humor, the poems speak bluntly about addiction, depression, and anxiety, but also the possibility of grace and mercy.
The poet seeks “a church that lets you scream,” a God that meets us in our failures and surprises us with forgiveness, a God that loves us “even if [we] never get better.” In this brutal but beautiful collection, hope abounds, God is close to the desperate, and hope can be found even in the depths.
“Beginning again and again and again” Lacour proclaims in these stunning confessional poems of suffering and separation from self, others, and God. Inscribing a landscape of addiction and alienation, in its minute particulars, this poet arrives at an honest and tenuous salvation. A Season in Heck & Other Poems is a volume not to be missed.
Peter Cooley, former Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Accounting for the Dark
In A Season in Heck, Justin Lacour’s portrayal of faith turns us, his readers, inside-out by encouraging us to confront the ramifications of grace. Lacour describes heaven as “a rose inside [the] brain / thorns and all so painful / at first it’s blinding . . . but there’s / light so much light.” Self-recrimination, forgiveness, and doubt intertwine. Anger chokes out hope, before, miraculously, “the voice underneath all / the other voices [cries for us] . . . like a child . . . stabbed in the heart.”
Divine Love, faithful but terrifying, encases Lacour’s words, a moving treatise on mercy where “the slightest forgiveness / nearly shatters [us].” Ultimately, A Season in Heck reaffirms God’s presence, “the way trees turn the color / of flame once a year / the way suffering clarifies love.” Don’t be surprised to find yourself in these poems, in this same “new morning. . . beginning again and again and again.”
Marjorie Maddox, author of Seeing Things
Justin Lacour isn’t here to play. There’s no use for pretty, inspirational verse when you’ve clawed your way through the depths to experience the incarnation at its most outrageous. Addiction, loss, anxiety, depression: none is too much for Lacour’s masterful pen nor the dogged compassion of Christ. A Season in Heck now rivals the Psalms as poetry I’ll pick up when I need to remember that I’m a shattered human in the hands of God who “pull[s] back the roof, / [to] scream love and forgiveness right in my face.”
Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place and Second Sky
Justin Lacour
lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children, and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. He is the author of six chapbooks of poems, including Hulk Church (Belle Point Press 2023) and Little motors (Bottlecap Press 2024), and his poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Spiritual Literature.