CALAMITY GOSPEL

Calamity Gospel seeks to remove the veil between body and spirit. The poems here-whether poems of love, mental illness, grief, or the spiritual-insist on a beauty amidst disaster. They live in the space between guilt and mercy, one eye toward the heaven of a lover's face, one eye toward personal apocalypse. The body and spirit both are not at rest in this life, and yet seem aimed at some dark and perfect mystery.

Ultimately, even in its hardest moments, art is optimism. Calamity Gospel journeys from youth and innocent love to eros to the tyranny of mania and the exile of depression finally to mercy. But even in mercy there is memory, and in memory, doubt and in doubt, the doorway to death, resplendent with light, but death nonetheless. Final, true, and complete. The good news of calamity.