Morgan Lucas Schuldt’s The Coroner on Angel Lust, Prayer I, and Prayer II build a lyric field from bodily motion, desire, prayer, invented compounds, repetition, questions, and broken syntax. Each poem lets language strain against ordinary grammatical expectation. Words bend, clauses remain suspended, and repeated structures gather emotional pressure across the page. The result is a poetics of instability in which desire and devotion keep changing shape through verbal invention.
The Coroner on Angel Lust
The Coroner on Angel Lust moves through physical motion, separation, questions, and altered words. Its title brings together forensic procedure and a charged, almost mythic figure. “Coroner” suggests examination after the fact, while “angel lust” joins transcendence with appetite. The poem enters the tension between these registers through a syntax that continually shifts.
Bodily language gives the poem its immediate force. Desire is experienced through movement and division. Questions interrupt whatever stability a statement begins to establish. The poem’s altered words intensify that uncertainty because familiar language keeps becoming unfamiliar at the moment of recognition.
Prayer I
Prayer I is driven by repeated conditional phrases. “If” keeps reopening the sentence and gives the poem a structure of suspended possibility. Every condition makes room for another condition, so the prayer grows through accumulation.
Black dress, song, blood, glances, dirt, loops, and light enter this recurring syntax. Their relation develops through sequence rather than explanation. A visual detail can acquire emotional charge simply because it arrives after a bodily image or before a phrase of desire.
The conditional form also changes the meaning of prayer. Prayer traditionally addresses a power beyond the speaker and may ask, praise, confess, or hope. Schuldt’s repeated “if” turns that address into a field of possibilities. The poem keeps testing the terms under which feeling might become speech.
Prayer II
Prayer II moves through sea-holly, body, care, craving, mouth, song, kiss, vanity, scenery, and the limits of control. Its broken spatial arrangement gives each phrase room to arrive as a separate pressure. White space becomes part of the syntax.
The sea-holly image introduces a plant whose form is both delicate and sharply structured. That combination suits a poem where intimacy carries beauty and difficulty at once. Mouth, kiss, craving, and song place desire in the body, while vanity and scenery make the social surface of desire visible.
Invented compounds
Schuldt repeatedly alters ordinary words by joining or reshaping them. A compound can make two concepts collide before syntax has time to explain their relation. This technique gives language a physical quality, as though words were pieces capable of being fitted into new structures.
Such invention also creates surprise. The reader recognizes parts of a word while encountering a form that has no settled habitual meaning. That moment slows reading and opens several possible interpretations at once.
Repetition as pressure
Repetition gives the three poems continuity. A conditional form returns, a sound cluster reappears, or a bodily image echoes an earlier passage. Each recurrence carries memory from the previous use.
This accumulation creates emotional pressure. A phrase may seem tentative at first and urgent after several returns. Repetition therefore works as a form of intensification and as a structural memory inside the poem.
Prayer and desire
Prayer and desire share an orientation toward something beyond immediate possession. Both can involve address, hope, repetition, and uncertainty. Schuldt’s poems bring these structures into close contact.
The result gives erotic language a devotional intensity and gives prayer a bodily presence. Song, blood, mouth, kiss, care, and craving belong to the same field because the poems treat longing as a condition that acts on syntax and perception.
Spatial fracture
Broken arrangement on the page changes pacing. A phrase isolated by white space receives more attention than it would inside continuous prose. Gaps can delay completion, separate images, or preserve several possible connections.
Schuldt uses that spatial freedom to keep meaning mobile. The reader crosses gaps and reconstructs relations among fragments. Reading becomes an active process of assembly.
Editorial and literary practice
Schuldt has also worked as the editor of CUE: A Journal of Prose Poetry. His writing has appeared in venues including Pleiades, Verse, Typo, LIT, POOL, and The Massachusetts Review, and the chapbook Otherhow was associated with Kitchen Press.
That editorial context belongs naturally beside poems so alert to prose poetry, fragment, and formal instability. Reading and publishing experimental writing create another environment in which questions of syntax, sequence, and genre remain active.
A restless lyric field
Taken together, the three poems make instability productive. Prayer becomes conditional, desire becomes fragmented, language invents compounds, and the page itself participates in the movement of thought.
Schuldt’s work gains force from this continual reshaping. Bodily image, verbal experiment, and repeated syntax create a lyric field where feeling remains intense because it never settles into a single fixed form.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for other writers working with prayer, fragment, desire, repetition, and experimental syntax.