Defying Augury

In this spiritually charged and psychologically daring epic, Shawn Callaway Hays reimagines himself as the battleground of three warring selves-each one cast in the mold of Dostoyevsky's Karamazov brothers: Ivan the skeptic, Dmitri the sensualist, and Alyosha the saint. In over 160 cantos, Defying Augury, My Center Cannot Hold becomes both a mythic poem and a metaphysical reckoning-where the poet's soul is split, tried, and reassembled through fire, falcons, prophecy, and memory. With a structure reminiscent of ancient scripture and a voice that swings between the defiant, the mystical, and the elegiac, Hays turns his inner conflict into a sacred drama that is as lyrical as it is philosophical. From the wilderness of subconscious sea-beasts and sibling betrayals to the strange annunciations of inner prophets, this epic becomes both a fractured autobiography and a cosmic drama. Shawn's internal voices-warring, merging, metamorphosing-chart a course through exile and eruption, through Eastern mysticism, Western theology, and poetic resistance. The result is an odyssey that is as metaphysical as it is emotional, a kind of American Mah¿bh¿rata fused with the tragic irony of modern faith and doubt. What begins as a soul's quest for coherence transforms into an odyssey of inner resurrection. Hays conjures a cosmos of courtroom visions, falcon-born archetypes, sea leviathans, and monastery dirt kissed by trembling saints. His language-poetic, radiant, often operatic-becomes a vessel for a triune spiritual autobiography, where the psyche is carved into competing yet interdependent brothers. With biblical cadence and ecstatic intensity, the poet's fragmented identities merge toward redemption, one Canto at a time. This is Leaves of Grass rewritten as spiritual disunion and resurrection. This is Paradise Lost retold as psychological self-portrait. This is The Brothers Karamazov transformed into prophetic punk opera. Hays names himself not just as poet, but as the scene of epic trial. And through that trial, the poet emerges not as a conqueror, but as an open wound transfigured into light.