Skandalon: Poems

In Christian theology, a skandalon is a distraction from grace, a maze of error where we wander pointlessly, wasting our lives. To the ancient Greeks, a skandalon was the trigger of a trap. T. R. Hummer’s labyrinthine new collection encompasses these meanings and more, as its poems take various paths — some beguiling, some grotesque, some instructive, some opaque — to unexpected destinations. Undergirding the collection is a series of progressive vignettes entitled “Victims of the Wedding,” which follows the quarrels and couplings of a human man and woman as well as the angel and demon who observe them.

Skandalon presents poems that consider the subtle, tragic, and ridiculous responses of creatures who lose themselves in a world they had wrongly imagined to be their own.