Pluck

Adam Hughes is a poet, writer, teacher, and performer. Pluck (BOA, 2025) is his fifth full-length poetry collection. Adam has been a pastor, a hospice grief coordinator, a college professor, and is currently a high school English teacher. Hughes lives in Bedford, VA.

"Pluck addresses the divine at eye-level, a daring conceit but one that helps us re-imagine (perhaps even rejoice) our proximity to grace while on the rocky path called life. Adam Hughes’ poems have given us an extraordinary gift: a new language—spiritual, nuanced, and achingly beautiful—with which to tell our stories, converse with God, and pray.” —Rigoberto González, author of To the Boy Who Was Night "I am so moved by Adam Hughes’ Pluck, so activated by its searching excavations of faith and manhood and God. ‘I forgive you for the foolishness with which you’ve forgiven me,’ Hughes writes to a capital-G God in whom he can muster only an imperfect faith, but to whom he can’t stop talking in gorgeous, rending, and sneakily quite funny verse. I’m in awe. Pluck enters into a kind of lyric lover’s quarrel with the divine, a tradition dating back to David’s Psalms (or even Enheduanna before him), and passing through Aquinas and Donne and Hopkins’ 'Terrible Sonnets.' St. John of the Cross, who wrote the original dark night of the soul, reminds us: ‘In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.’ This is a book about the long dark nights, yes, but it’s also about sticking around—by whatever means—to see the light." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!