Holy the Body (Volume 44)

Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Sun, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, and a variety of other places. He grew up in Inman, South Carolina, a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Donovan lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and their two children.

“If sacred texts lend our inscrutable world divine sight, then the exquisitely funny and magically solemn poems of Donovan McAbee humanize full force the believer's very real confrontation with that which tests faith and mutes joy. And thus, I am less lonesome. He travels his past to witness from the deepest spaces of the heart's terrace. Holy the Body makes merry the dilemmas of living with grief and the pleasures of loving this world in spite of further inevitable loss, rendering us speechless. 'The best words sew a seam across the tear of silence.' The best words are found in this book in your hands.” —Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle“Are our bodies electric, comic, troublesome, sacred? In Donovan McAbee's spirited and tender Holy the Body, the answer is YES, YES, YES, YES. These are poems of deep humor and pathos, exploring an embodied pilgrim's journey through faith and its faithful companion, doubt. Poems of growing up, of grief while facing down the death of a parent, and of wonder as one falls in love and prepares to become a parent oneself. If the young Donovan, gobsmacked by God onto his back on the floor of a storefront church, 'couldn't stop crying for the beauty of it all,' reading these poems, you too might find yourself confounded by the trouble, and braced by the pleasure, of being a turbulent, sensual, fleshy, human.” —Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge“Upon a tableau where God is as real as sugar, rock songs hide messages from the devil, and a mother tries to be stronger than death, Donovan McAbee's Holy the Body portrays innocence alongside violence before a return to innocence through clear sighted recollections. As a boy "Jesus talked to me / just for the asking," but later, he's "guided by a trick of light." These poems seek comfort - not by turning over tables, but through form and volta, languaging what secrets forbade, using sparse lyrics that, while they do not deliver him from evil, still proclaim: "I know you by the space / you leave empty." —Pádraig Ó Tuama, author of Kitchen Hymns“Donovan McAbee's Holy the Body is a poetic bildungsroman for our time. Perfectly positioned in Christianity's sweet spot—the opposing tensions of body and mind—it traces the lifelong development of a contemporary believer's spiritual life: an ordinary man buffeted by the bizarre properties and constant temptations of 21st century life as he strives to retain his faith. A master of the Southern vernacular voice and colloquial language, McAbee delivers folksy narratives that ruminate on various theological issues: "I wait for you, Lord/like a mailbox for a letter. // The grass still wonders/ how the ground got there." Numerous poems that address the painful and parsed out deaths of the narrator's parents gently stress the book's theodical impulse: if God is a loving God, why do we suffer? why is there evil? Balancing out this philosophical seriousness, is a joyous (and at times absurdist) sense of humor that is not above giving side eye on occasion: "the traveling evangelist with the permed mullet." McAbee's portrait of an open-handed, non-judgmental, big tent Christianity will appeal to all who seek connection to something larger, more compassionate, and less corporeal than themselves.” —Kate Daniels, author of In the Months of My Son's Recovery“Holy the Body is an astonishing mashup of the sacred and quotidian, a hymn to the divine that resides in the mundane. Donovan McAbee invites us into a world where Mother Teresa appears in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Jesus performs party tricks, and last rites mean smoking a cigarette with a beloved grandmother. The commonplace—cable boxes, paper cuts, the internet, hemorrhoidal butts—usher in both apocalypse and praise. These poems are compressed gems of faith, emotion, and longing, grounded in an apophatic theology that speaks to the holes in our hearts: "I know you by the space / you leave empty . . . I wait for you, Lord, / like a mailbox for a letter." At once irreverent and sincere, McAbee is a contemporary mystic, self-effacing and profound, limning psalms of mortality, family, love, corporeality, and the grace of the everyday.” —Erika Meitner, author of Useless Junk