Many Gods

Cale Young Rice composed these poems in the strange in-between spaces of early 20th-century Asia, where ancient traditions still held sway against the encroaching modern world. Traveling from the temples of Japan to the deserts of Persia, from the sacred rivers of India to the mountain kingdoms of Korea, Rice encountered peoples and practices that must have seemed almost unbearably foreign to an American poet of his era. Yet rather than simply catalog the exotic, these poems attune themselves to something deeper: the way a stranger learns to see, the quiet vertigo of standing before a god whose name you cannot pronounce, the unexpected moments of connection that bridge language and centuries. The title holds its own tension, for 'many gods' becomes not mere relativism but a genuine reckoning with the limits of one's own understanding. These are poems of sustained attention, of a traveler learning to be still long enough to hear what the silence between strangers might contain. For readers who seek poetry that holds both wanderlust and reverence, who want to feel the particular strangeness of encountering the sacred in unfamiliar places, this collection remains a quiet, rewarding companion.