this voice has an echo

by emma mccoy

What does it mean to hear God speak?

The prophets of the Old Testament faced burning bushes, bloody altars, deceitful kings, split seas, and generals determined to get their own way. They lived in wartime, peacetime, deserts, and walled cities. They heard animals talk. They faced off warlords. They hid in caves and wept. But through all of it, they lived in a visceral, spiritual time, responding to both God and their fellow people. Profoundly flawed and never ordinary, the prophets of the Old Testament speak throughout Scripture words of truth that challenge power.

Reimagining powerhouse Old Testament prophets, This Voice Has an Echo takes men and women of God in their contexts and out of them, weaving poetry that explores a prophet’s role. From a Miss Universe contest to a therapist’s office to the deserts of Israel, prophecy is often tricky and double-edged. These speakers for God—whether they’re a veteran suffering from night terrors or an artist getting a painting right—prophesy with a voice that echoes and echoes and echoes.

praise for this voice has an echo

In This Voice Has an Echo, Emma McCoy calls on us to take time, to listen quietly, to allow her verses to resound in our own creative hearing. We respond not just to the words on the pages of this adventurous new collection, but to affirm how our own hearing takes and grows as we delight in the voice of a kindred spirit. This is just what such fresh writing will do, allowing the biblical characters to develop three-dimensional authenticity as they hear what their own voices are announcing, describing, or imagining.

—LUCI SHAW, author of An Incremental Life

What an incredible full-length debut from Emma McCoy! This Voice Has an Echo takes a deep dive into the lives of the prophets (including the oft-excluded women). Drawing from both Christian and Jewish traditions, McCoy matches prophetic voices with a variety of poetic forms, sometimes setting the prophets in their original contexts, and sometimes placing them in new situations or updating their dialects. The result is surprising, delightful, thought-provoking, and brilliant. Set aside whatever you think you’ll find in this book, and let these poems call you out or call you in.

—KATIE MANNING, editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review

I like the poet’s engagement with Scripture—to expound, to imagine, to associate, to make contemporary, as Ehud in a bar and Miriam at the Blackfoot River in Montana. McCoy writes of the lesser prophets, Haggai, Habakkuk, Amos, Obadiah, Joel. She addresses the more familiar names, Elijah, Job, Daniel, Isaiah, the Lord himself. She writes of the women, Sarah, Abigail, and Deborah in sonnet form. I was glad to meet them all.

—DIANE GLANCY, author of Psalm to Whom(e)

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