Blurbs for The Drag Gospel ​

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This stunning debut is the trans revelation (the trans revolution!) I didn’t know I needed. Starting with the very first poem . . . we are invited to join in upending hetero- and cis-sexist narratives: From queer retellings of Biblical stories to the rivers and swamps of contemporary Florida, the poems in this wide-ranging collection are electrically funny, self-aware, and formally inventive.

               Sebastian Merrill, author of GHOST :: SEEDS

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Chris Watkins’s debut is unlike any poetry collection I’ve encountered. Their devotion to the natural world—and to the body as a part of that world—is capital H Holy. Every time I read a poem in this book, I feel as if I’m embarking on a brand-new journey. And I trust Watkins to lead every step of the way. 

              Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck and Canon: A Nonbinary Epic

 

As a person in a body, a body that is both my ongoing constraint and my ongoing liberation, I would go to church with Chris Watkins any day of the week. Which is to say I trust this poet to accompany me, even guide me, into an experience with mystery, with transformation, with the divine. . . Formally voracious, lovely, and keenly adept . . . a book I will return to again and again – to sing and teach from, to cackle and cry and pray and praise with. 

               TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices

 

“Maybe I’m a hymn.  A song against binaries…” writes this poet and ecoactivist in their new collection. And yes, they are that, exactly.  Watkins reveals to us through non-binary body and riverine landscape, the original intention of Earth for her creatures.

               Susan Cerulean, author of I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter’s Memoir

 

The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus is a phenomenal debut by the poet Chris Watkins. Watkins coined the term “gender-nonconformalism” to describe an innovation in contemporary poetry where formalism marries gender nonconformity. . . Poems in this book are simultaneously high-stakes, deadly serious, and hilarious. How many books can do that?

               The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Pills & Jacksonvilles

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Chris Watkins’s speakers want for nothing because they are in adept, agile hands. Whether the eighteenth-century gender-nonconforming preacher, the Public Universal Friend, this century’s pop savants Doja Cat and the City Girls, or speakers closer to the Midwestern and Florida Panhandle homes that shape [Chris’s] ecopoetics most . . . The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus commingle[s] righteous rage and tenderness  . . . [with a] generation-defining vision and vocal range.

               L. Lamar Wilson, Author of Sacrilegion and Prime

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