The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat - by Melody S Gee (Paperback)

About the Book

Melody Gee's poetry meets at the intersection of cultural and spiritual identity, investigating how belief defines us.

Book Synopsis

Melody S. Gee's The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat meets at the intersection of cultural and spiritual identity, culminating in a set of harrowing poems that investigates how belief defines us.

This powerful collection from Melody S. Gee signals a new voice in poetry that grapples with faith and identity. These poems ask challenging questions about the role that belief plays in one's perception of themselves.

The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat investigates Gee's own beliefs in intimate and profound ways. What does being Catholic mean in a modern world? What does that belief system look like as an adult convert?

Additionally, Gee conveys important truths in these poems about the tension between her Asian American heritage and her newfound spirituality.

Readers looking for modern poems about faith and self will find a new favorite in The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat.

This collection also features a bespoke interview at the end, delving into discussions about craft, influences, and the writer's own experiences that inspired their work.

Review Quotes

"Melody Gee's gorgeous poems offer both divine wounds and delicious consolations. At the intersections of the familial and the sacred, The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat reminds us that what is created is also consumed. Beautiful, sensory, and aching, this collection reminds us that not all hungers are mortal ones."

- Traci Brimhall, author of Our Lady of the Ruins

"Melody Gee's The Convert's Heart Is Good to Eat is a book of captivating intensity and precision. This compact collection reveals a talent and range that are rare in recent books of poems by American poets. Deeply evocative, Gee's lyric meditations on motherhood, being a daughter, and on how one shapes a voice for an adult convert are as necessary as food and water for the living soul."

- Eugene Gloria, author of Sightseer in this Killing City

"What happens when the call of spirit utterly changes a life? "To be consoled begins with grief," Melody S. Gee writes, and I think about that prefix, con: how it means "with" in Latin; how Gee's book is a chronicle of being with: with God, and with parents, children, and the old self, in the light of new faith. I thought too of the word concord-to "heart" with another. How do I walk in concord? This is the primary question of Gee's moving book."

- Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are