Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials, Foreword by Sofia M. Starnes, Resource Publications, 2019.

What does it mean that the Psalms are the prayer book of the people? Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Psalms Responsorials is one such person’s prayer book. Using familiar refrains as their starting points, the poems attempt a balance between how the Psalmist understood God’s faithfulness and how the poet’s lived experience requires revised understanding in some places, renewed commitment in others.  In addition to an insightful Foreword by acclaimed poet Sofia M. Starnes, these 64 poems tell of an intimate, honest reorientation to God’s promises.

Rocking can be purchased as a paperback at the Wipf and Stock website or as a paperback or in hardcover at Amazon. Copies can be purchased directly from the author for $10, shipping included, by emailing your request to maryhan47 at gmail dot com.

Rocking, read by Deborah Thorne Mazzone, Charles C. Bradley, and the author, can be purchased as an Audible download at Amazon or at Audible.

Rocking can be downloaded as an ebook at the Amazon Kindle store or on Google Play.

Praise for Rocking

“In Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo, Maryanne Hannan invites us to find the cosmic irony in understanding human life as merely a brief solo interlude during which we wait for the climax in the whole grand story of God’s creation of the world and its end, when each of our lives is already ultimately eternal and communal because ‘divinity itself we bear,’ and God’s presence is palpable in the here and now as well.”

—Mary Ann B. Miller, Professor of Literature, Caldwell University and Founding Editor of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry

“In her brief lyrics, Maryanne Hannan offers readers a voice that poses questions, gives praise, displays wit— all genuine expressions of a poet who knows the power of the right word rightly placed. Conversing with the language of the Psalms, these poems showcase the spectrum of the ways humans respond to the Divine.”

—Nathaniel Lee Hansen, Editor, The Windhover

“Maryanne Hannan’s debut collection is a book of contemporary poems and prayers that resurrects worn out religious language and breathes new life into it. . . . The theme of the volume woven throughout is gratitude for the miraculous fact of creation as the poet invents a book of Psalms for our present moment, charging each poem with ‘the light of [God’s] grandeur’ and laying claim to poetry as both sign of our fall and source of our salvation, ‘our very own grasped apple.’ To read these poems is to pray them and to assent to Hannan’s generous doxology: ‘Holy, what’s lost / Holy, what’s found / Holy, the Whole.’”

—Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Lovers’ Almanac and Still Pilgrim

(Click here to view press kit. Author Interview Included )

Excerpts from Rocking Reviews

The lively, life-affirming collection explores spirituality and connection to God on a personal and communal level through contemporary poetic responses… Hannan’s debut delivers. The collection rocks.

• Donna Dzurilla, review in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, 2021.