Books

Gospel Drunk

University of Alberta Press (2021)

Gospel Drunk follows a speaker’s journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as “dragons in suits” collide with critiques of “the broken bicycle of recovery.” A child’s fingers interlace to form a gun during mass and Hulk attends an AA meeting. Boldly honest, Gospel Drunk is for all who seek humanity in a world where the personal and the political are equally complicated. “He drops a match on his wound to set fire to his blood. At a certain temperature even the Devil cools.”—from “Drowning Man Sonnets”

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Short Histories of Light

McGill-Queen’s University Press (2018)

This debut collection recounts the speaker’s Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common, but too often taboo, subject of mental illness. Vivid and haunting, at once tender and terse, Short Histories of Light captures what it feels like to be short- circuited in a world of darkness. A boy stares helplessly through the walls of the family home, watches “filaments in glass skulls buzzing.” A father’s birthmark is described as a “scarlet letter.” Grandma is portrayed as a “forgotten girl on a Ferris wheel of feelings.”

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