Greater Things Than These is a lyrical fever dream-a cry from someonelaying in the dark on the chapel floor. In this incandescent debut collection,Clayton James Hester writes with the hunger of a mystic and the heartbreakof a lover unmoored. These poems are not polite. They weep, ache, yearn,praise, and burn. They trace the sacred and profane in the aftermath of love,the marrow-deep ache of desire, the ghost of God, and the body as bothaltar and battlefield. Raised on a Missouri farm and trained as a journalist, Hester fuses devotionalcadence with raw emotional maximalism. He writes toward the invisible, theforbidden, the abandoned inviting the reader to a place where vulnerabilitybecomes holy and grief becomes song. This is not a collection for the dispassionate. It is a love letter to shatteredsouls and everything that shatters them