Fear Not is lyrical, political, raunchy, blasphemous, and deeply engaged with ethical questions. Inspired by the Gideon Bible's list of self-help topics each poem is arranged to play off poetic and Biblical forms.

Ranging in subject from suicide to divorce, unemployment to gratitude, Afghanistan to Gethsemane, Fear Not attempts consolation, all the while mocking its own failure to lessen human pain.

Mierau also surveys contemporary culture, skewering our intense involvement with pop phenomena such as America's Next Top Model and Britney Spears. He recalls the formal beauty of the Psalms with refrains that echo the debased commercial speech used to advertise iPods, Kahlua, and Cialis.

Born in Indiana, Maurice Mierau grew up in Nigeria, Manitoba, Jamaica, Kansas, and Saskatchewan, and now lives in Winnipeg. You can watch a video trailer for Detachment: An Adoption Memoir (Freehand Books) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g9n-HmUJTyA. Maurice is also the author of several books of poetry, including Fear Not, which won the ReLit Award in 2009, and his first collection, Ending With Music (Brick Books, 2002).

Maurice Mierau's profile page

• Winner, Relit Award for Poetry

“What the reader needs advice on is what to do with a split side…. This is a wonderfully humorous collection.” —Prairie Fire magazine

"Striking a fine balance of irony and heart, Fear Not is a whimsical and contemplative refrain for the excesses of an ‘enough is never enough’ culture….

Giving voice to a lineage of fathers — from Wittgenstein and a German grandfather to Jesus and the poet himself — Mierau weaves fragments of lyric, narrative and Bible passages into an existential ‘Selah,’ a hymnal shout-out to the muffle of earbudded, iPodded masses capable of carrying ‘5000 songs in your hand.'” —Winnipeg Free Press

“a very important book of poems…. This is parody as hard-boiled deconstruction on behalf of integrity. The poems survey once assuring and still haunting but worn-out conventions as well as inanities and profanities of contemporary pop culture….” —Rhubarb magazine

In Fear Not, Maurice Mierau boldly disturbs and draws from The Gideon Bible; the result is a magnificent achievement, a palimpsest at once steeped in irony and starkly tender, profane and sacred, ancient and relentlessly contemporary. With its formal innovations and haunting echoes, this is rare and necessary poetry for our time, for the skeptics and the faithful alike. —Barbara Nickel, author of Domain