The Pope's Astronomer is a wide-ranging collection of contemporary American poems by GF Korreck, attentive to the ordinary moments in which memory, grief, humor, faith, anger, love, and animal presence suddenly become luminous.

Moving from childhood ballfields, family kitchens, and Michigan streets to public tragedies, biblical figures, political spectacle, endangered animals, art, music, and the afterlife, these poems speak in a voice at once plainspoken, wry, and tender. The collection turns again and again toward questions of how we remember, how we survive, what we owe to the vulnerable, and how beauty keeps appearing even in an unkind world.

For readers of accessible literary poetry, The Pope's Astronomer offers elegies, comic visions, meditations, character sketches, and small revelations. It is a book for anyone who has found a whole life in a passing image, a lost voice, a family story, an old dog, a dark joke, or the sudden generosity of light. These poems are intimate without being closed off, funny without being glib, and clear-eyed without surrendering their belief in mercy, imagination, and the magic of words.