By: Shanley Poole

The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey by Alex Mouw offers readers a refreshing lexicon for the divine—one which exchanges pewed hymns for roadside vespers and finds the common thread between nettles and seminarian beads. Mouw excavates his knotted, religious roots in Midwest Protestantism, gently untangling them before tucking them back in the earth.  

The first poem introduces readers to “a kid / engrossed in sci-fi novels / during math. Small minded,” and while the speaker of the poem clarifies this is not who he is, a reader becomes skeptical and enchanted by the very presence that the speaker resists embodying. These paradoxes exist throughout the collection, befitting as Mouw both exonerates and questions the paradoxes of Christianity. 

Mouw refuses the stale pretense that a strong faith is an unwavering one; instead, the poet pendulums between doubts and epiphanies. The final two poems serve as a lasting gesture of this. In “Last Address to the Lord,” a speaker seeks out divinity: 

   Sick with waiting 
I checked the lake 

   even stirred 
the water with a cattail    made beautiful

ripples that were not    forthcoming 
               found termites 
in a maple 
but never you 

This unyielding search gives way to the collection’s final poem “Incarnate,” in which “Christ in a breastplate of bark” returns to heal both people and the earth as he “arms endangered blossoms with petals.” In such moments, Mouw leans into the collection’s most powerful subversion. Rather than a human-serving deity, Mouw conjures the possibility of a god whose definition of “the least of these” includes the birds and blossoms of the air, the fish of the lake, and the cat of the monastery. 

In his willingness to question, Mouw joins the traditions of Donne and Hopkins as well as contemporaries like Padraig O’Tuama and Rebecca Gayle Howell. That is to say, Mouw dissects his faith not out of malcontent; instead, he reaches for a scalpel to better understand and at times to cure. Like O’Tuama and Howell, the choice to subvert becomes a gesture of love for the very establishments they critique.  

And just as O’Tuama and Howell draw from their beloved landscapes of Ireland and Kentucky, Mouw beds many of his poems in the Midwestern landscape that held his youth. The fever-dream portrait that Mouw paints of West Michigan hits with documentary accuracy for those who have experienced it, while still managing to hold an accessible invitation to those unfamiliar. At “Lake Michigan’s weeping edge” the church youth groups “[strum] prayers for twenty-four hours” and the metaphors of God (“like a precious stone in a ring”) rained abundantly. The collection as a whole resists the temptation of a simplified tone, and as showcased in the poem “White Evangelical, Early Millenial,” Mouw resists the easy trope of a played-out skeptic by offering placating memories such as the admonition that “The communion bread was sweet.” The poem itself doesn’t take the easy route of condemnation or praise. Instead it floats between the two, and further complicates by leaving room for the ironies of “sunning at the county beach in August” where they “dug in for rapture.” The poet frequently parries his own theological chops with humor, and vice versa. While satirizing the corny metaphors of a preacher, Mouw manages to descend into reflections on a rather horrific miracle: 

It’s that when Christ lay down on a dead girl, 

she woke to the smell of many days 
in the desert, of stinking fish

and she wriggled under him terrified. 

Mouw continues to move forward with the terror and weight, but transfers it next to the religious iconoclast. 

…the girl knew 
that when Christ woke in pure dark 
before folding the winding sheet 
and shoving the tombstone aside 

he felt the urge to lie back down, 
leave the rest of us 
to work things out. 

In keeping with the Psalms, Mouw continues on with his dissection through cutting questions. In a rendering of Jesus’ crucifixion, Mouw imagines “…He reached for that / cup of pain which looked as endless as it felt pointless.” Mouw then ties off this poem in an air of bewilderment: “Who does that?” Two poems later, Mouw asks: “does God cause the people to be wicked / as an excuse to grind them down, / or only whisper the fact of wickedness?” Our poet does not attempt to then conquer the poem with answers. He lets the rest of the lines accompany his query. At times, readers of The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey will be gifted with a poem that sits at the edge of epiphany; “A Morning’s Work” and “A Scientist on the BBC Explains Electromagnetism” are two such poems. The latter begins with some of my favorite of the collection’s lines: 

Obvious, really. It requires 
no advance knowledge 
to see everything 
is, deep down, electric. 

Such a moment showcases Mouw at his finest. Where the poet finds theology dry, he dredges divinity from broadcast waves. He shames himself for not seeing god in the trees, but wait—there, in the museum’s geode, something shines! Mouw has created a pedestrian handbook for accessing the divine. But in this context, I’d like to reclaim the word pedestrian. What I mean to say is that this book grants us permission (as the poet himself writes) to “pout and marvel” at the world around us. Whether Mouw places us at a church door, jungle gym, or dusty apartment, he gives us access to “every bend in thought” and we are all the luckier for it.

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Shanley Poole is a writer, artist, and educator. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in The Indianapolis Review, Analog, F(r)iction, The Common, 14 Poems, and Quarter(ly) Journal. She was a 2017 fellow at the Beargrass Writing Retreat, a 2024 writer-in-residence at Azule Residency, and former Storyteller at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency. They hold an MFA from UNC-Greensboro.