The Alchemy of Grace: Devotional Sonnets after Vittoria Colonna

The devotional poems in The Alchemy of Grace don’t preach or tell you how to live-instead they offer humble words that can be spoken with the poet, prayers that acknowledge the struggles of the journey of faith even as they celebrate the glory of the Christian promise. There are poems imploring help, asking forgiveness, admitting weakness and failure, and honestly facing the desire to give up, to stop trying, and to take the easy road. But shining through it all is the sun, the moon, the saints, and the sea, which each in their own way speak the majesty of God and the transformative power of life in Christ.

The book is inspired by the ground-breaking devotional poetry of Vittoria Colonna, the Renaissance poet who grew famous writing secular love sonnets before turning her back on worldly expectations and transforming the sonnet form into a vessel for devotional searching. These poems reimagine each of her 103 Sonnets for Michelangelo in fresh, contemporary language perfect for daily devotional reading, for prayer, for contemplation, and to turn to when you’re struggling.

Ravenna Cole grew up in a trailer in rural Pennsylvania and moved to the Arizona desert when she was in high school. Raised in non-denominational churches, she left her faith behind while studying philosophy in college. It was during her preparation for a PhD dissertation on Kierkegaard that she started to take Christianity seriously again, which ultimately led to her reception into the Catholic Church.

Cole is cast in the mold of ancient philosophers, for whom thinking is done while walking and talking and ideas are tried in the fires of life. After her conversion, she adopted a nomadic life in search of a more poetic way to dwell, living most of the last decade on a small sailboat with her husband and four children. Cole began writing poetry seriously after the birth of her first child and studied for a time in a creative writing MFA program but left it to pursue a poetic vision outside of the academy. She currently divides her time between Florida and Alaska.