This Persistent Gravity - by Angie Crea O'Neal (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This Persistent Gravity explores our deepest longings to find wholeness, our desire to set things right and to, as Wordsworth wrote, see "into the life of things." This desire to reconcile only exists because things have gone wrong, sometimes in sudden terrible ways but mostly in gradual inevitable ways, the consequences of daily living-aging parents, broken hearts, even growing children. Inspired by Romantic poetry, astronomy, physics, nature, and motherhood, the poems in this debut collection chronicle what it means to live and lose and what exists in the wake of our losses. It's about waiting, surrendering, and rediscovering joy and awe in the midst of a fallen world.

Review Quotes

The Old Testament, the history of poetry, "the thrumming music of bodies" Angie Crea O'Neal's superb new collection contains multitudes and rewards numerous careful readings. These are poems to fall into and wander, as many-roomed as heavenly mansions. Together, they comprise what will surely be among the year's most auspicious debuts.

-Graham Hillard, Editor, Cumberland River Review

In Angie Crea O'Neal's vibrant first collection This Persistent Gravity, she guides us with a sensitive hand through the difficulties and fears of single motherhood and the joys and losses time brings. She invites us to "climb the streets of your childhood, the place / that still holds you, haunts you like a dream" in search of wisdom and truth. These poems contain the mundane and small-laundry, Mayflies, playing in the hose in the summer-alongside the philosophies of Milton, Hopkins, and the Holy Bible, and lead us "Back to paying attention as / we listen for the lonesome shrill of a night / train in the distance, its promise of going home."

-Renee Emerson, author of Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2022)