Donovan McAbee
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Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Hudson Review, The Sun, Garden & Gun, Poetry London, and a variety of other places. His academic monograph Charles Simic and the Poetics of Uncertainty was published in 2020. He grew up in a small town in South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in creative writing and contemporary poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and their two children. His new poetry collection is Holy the Body.
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Donovan McAbee
Holy the Body
Holy the Body wrestles with ghosts and shadows, discovers Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee and Jesus’s tears in a trick of light. At once dark and humorous, these poems confront the religiosity of the US and explore the experience of faithful doubt, as God himself “goes under the knife.” The poems in this manuscript take the reader through the brutalities of the author losing his mother to melanoma and of resuscitating his own father, with “the cracking of sternum beneath my hands.” The collection chisels out a hard-earned language for the sacred, one which proclaims that the beauty we find in the midst of uncertainties is itself a solace that, as one of the final poems in the manuscript affirms, “is more than enough.”
