With the Dogstar as My Witness

Organized around the Catholic canonical prayer hours, beginning in the evening and moving into morning (vespers, compline, vigils, lauds), and set in an ethereal South Texas landscape, the poems in John Fry's debut collection, ''With the Dogstar as My Witness,'' wrestle with theological and deeply personal concerns in language that is wrenched almost to breaking, but which holds after all and forms a tapestry of (sometimes tortured) prayer.