A Limited Number of Miracles

Description

Jonathan Penton

A Limited Number of Miracles: a walk through the New Orleans Sculpture Garden

ISBN: 978-1-956921-61-8 (pbk.)

(November 15, 2025) 

In A Limited Number of Miracles: a walk through the New Orleans Sculpture Garden, poet Jonathan Penton explores sixty-six pieces from the Sculpture Garden and the feelings they evoke. He uses these sculptures to process and discuss themes of grief, family, relationships, and sexuality. The result is a complex tome of ekphrasis and emotion, covering a wide range of subjects and themes, all centered in the beautiful New Orleans Sculpture Garden.

Dexterous and captivating, Jonathan Penton’s A Limited Number of Miracles is a powerfully political navigation through the New Orleans Sculpture Garden. In stunning poems of slant ekphrasis, Penton engages inventively and intuitively with the artworks, often in dialogue with them. Furthermore, as the poems question what the sculptures “know”, they constitute a moving, extended elegy for the departed. This is pulsating writing, cognizant of the ineffable, celebrating complexity and the visceral in equal measure.

—Cassandra Atherton, co-editor of Ekphrastic Poetry: An Introduction

Jonathan Penton conjures a poetic travel log within a sculpture garden, offering a sustained collection of musings, recriminations and epiphanies extending beyond both the representative and the abstract. A Limited Number of Miracles provides the reader with a welcome dichotomy of possibilities and reality checks. I really loved this manuscript.  It took me on quite a journey, a very impressive one.

—Gina Ferrara, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2025–7, author of Amiss

these are poems about things that exist within a very specific place. the pieces in this book never allow these pieces to forget that. neither do these pieces forget where the poet is. these pieces are as atmospheric as they are ekphrastic. the speaker of the poem, if such a thing exists in any of these poems, carries its sense of self and setting into each sculpture while helping these pieces to speak for their selves. as such, the reader can bring oneself into this book and into this garden and hear these sculptures not only speak but to converse.

—Kenning JP García, author of With (Really Serious Literature)

Rilke’s famous poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” begins by describing the external features of a classical statue, but pivots suddenly and shockingly to the viewer’s internal state. Jonathan Penton accomplishes this with a virtual stroll past 66 sculptures from the Besthoff Sculpture Garden in New Orleans, responding initially to their forms, but as the walk progresses, to the raw emotions they provoke. “Let’s cross paths in a sculpture garden / with suspicion in our eyes,” he writes. Don’t miss the chance to seize a copy of this book and say yes to a master flâneur’s invitation.

—Julie Kane, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2011–3, author of Naked Ladies