In a preface to the collection Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology, the editors April Lindner and Ryan Wilson discuss their criteria for measuring, more or less, what kind of Catholic a poet has to be to warrant inclusion in the book. It is unintentionally hilarious: “We have included only writers who have not publicly and categorically disavowed Catholicism….”
In other words, a baptized Catholic poet has to work really hard—completely reject the faith in front of everyone—to get him or herself exiled from a book of Catholic poetry. The vast width of this book’s Catholic net is itself very Catholic. Despite a few shrill moralizing voices here and there, Catholics are not very discriminatory when we consider what kind of baptized Catholic still gets to be on the Catholic team. I love this book’s criteria.
The editors qualify that the poets should be writing “in the context of their faith.” Which they do. (Implicitly, the poets should also be able to write, you know, good poetry.) Flipping through the pages of this anthology and opening to random poems is rewarded by some crystalline lines: In “Getting Clean,” Kate Daniels writes: “Even the addicts/ who are atheists/ learn this lesson:/ There is something/ bigger than they are,/ and unlike them,/ it lives forever.”
April Lindner’s “Fontanel,” which centers on a mother tending her infant child, observes, “When I sing your name I borrow a lilt/ I’d never use in speech. The words/ don’t matter; I’m saying drink me while you can,/ like milk.”
In “Memoir,” Franz Wright speaks in the voice of people who might dread the man himself, Franz Wright, showing up at their door. “Just hope he forgot the address/ and don’t answer the phone// for a week: put out all the lights// in the house—/ behave like you aren’t there.”
In the anthology’s introduction, Wilson writes that “underlying these poems is an acute awareness that this world is a wonder, that each moment of every human being’s life is a wonder.”
In this year’s poetry roundup, some of the poets whose collections we discuss are Catholic, some are not (neither baptized Catholic nor denouncers of their Catholicism, they just never had it in the first place). But regardless of their religious commitments, wonder shows up in these poets’ work again and again.
Joe Hoover
Amy Gerstler’s collection Is This My Final Form examines themes of transition, change and even reincarnation through satirical and, at times, highly conceptual poems. The book is comic yet thoughtful. It even goes beyond poetry to include a 10-minute play, “Siren Island.” The sirens, half-human, half-fish and unbound from human responsibilities and yearnings, nevertheless bicker and argue about the intricacies of love, passion and substance abuse. At the end of the play they ultimately give in to their carnal desires.
Gerstler’s opening poem, “When I was a bird,” perhaps best captures her themes and style. The piece dives into the speaker’s supposed past lives as different aviary companions, describing a vivid and free life unburdened with the struggles of mankind. She goes deeper and deeper into the descriptions of her past lives as different birds before ending with the line: “Alas, no one believes me.”
Will Gualtiere
After the Carnival, by Alfred Nicol, is a collection of poems that go from sorrowful to devastating to uplifting and back around again. While many of the poems end in some sort of tragedy, Nicol is consistently winking at the reader even in the gloomiest places. The author’s quick wit and energy are on full display,
The poem that stands out the most is “An Irreverent Portrait of Father McLaughlin.” Its pithy theme is a familiar three-word mantra at the heart of Father McLaughlin’s preaching: “God is Love.” As the poem points out, “Against the Catholic preference for doom,// three words for all that’s beautiful and true.” This biblical truth permeates moments of darkness that can blind us. God is the love that shines upon us and keeps us together.
Lifted up by Nicol’s sharp words, the works in this collection jerk us from poem to poem and emotion to emotion. But the author guides the reader to a powerful source of hope, the same one Father McLaughlin is drawn to. Nicol sprinkles this and other religious imagery throughout the book and creates a narrative showcasing the redemptive power of faith.
Will Gualtiere
In Shocking the Dark, the poet Robert Lowes does just that, illuminating and exploring some of the darkest chapters in American history. In “The Temple of the Lost Cause,” Lowes ruminates on a painting in a funeral home that depicted Robert E. Lee holding a sleeping white child and a Bible on his lap. Lowes examines how such portrayals of Confederate figures keep the “lost cause” of the Confederacy alive and well in the South: “Inside the gilt frame, the Lost Cause/ wasn’t lost, wasn’t subject to slaughter./ God’s leather-bound word guarded the boy.”
Along with the ruminations on Lee, Lowes features the Swiss-born German painter Paul Klee, who used his art to defy the Nazis. In other poems, such as a section called “Overnight Snow: Haiku and Senryu,” he speaks to the banality of American life: divorce, therapy, friends moving away, antidepressants, drinking coffee, making small talk with a waitress, passing a panhandler on the street and “the snowstorm I feared/ lovely/ coming down.”
Grace Copps
In Which Seeds Will Grow?, the Palestinian-American poet Andrew J. Calis grapples with the generational trauma and nascent dreaming inherent to his heritage. One poem illustrates this theme in surprising fashion. In “The Mowing That Woke My Daughter,” Calis compares a landscaping project happening next door to the forced eviction his father experienced in Jerusalem. “They are not my enemy/ I remind myself,/ Though they are/ tearing up the public hill just past my fence,” Calis writes. “But here, at home, I am left/ with the broken purple-yellow bruising and the memories/ of my father: who saw/ Israeli jets swoop over his house in Jerusalem.”
He ends the poem with a succinct summary of the delicate balance between pain and hope at the core of his identity: “I wonder what seeds will grow from this,/ what next year will look like, and what sort of/ hate it is to watch things fall apart.”
Grace Copps
Anne Montgomery, R.S.C.J., entered the Society of the Sacred Heart at the age of 21 and began a life of service. She taught children with learning disabilities, got arrested protesting for nuclear disarmament, and aided families in Iraq that lost their homes and loved ones during the first Persian Gulf war. Arise and Witness is a collection of poems that features the “Resister Sister” meditating on various Gospel stories and characters, her time in prison for her activism, and how she is able to balance hope and despair in the middle of a war zone.
“Ourselves the seeds,/ fallen,/ broken,/ empty—/ in the desert of our flight/ to freedom,/ as pure as truth,/ a Child,” writes Sister Montgomery in “Feast of the Innocents.” This is her credo. While humans continue to perpetuate wars and other atrocities on one another, we can look to Jesus to be our salvation, to free us from cycles of violence, pain and oppression.
Grace Copps
Washing My Mother’s Body, by Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet laureate of the United States, is an extended meditation on the poet grieving and accepting her mother’s death by imagining washing her dead body. Harjo feels she would have been able to accept her mother’s death more fully if she could have performed this ritual. The poem is an elegy, a lament about the death of a loved one as well as an art book. Vibrant watercolor paintings stream and dance around the words on every page, depicting faces, people, bowls and doves, which in their own way reinforce the author’s inner conflict.
Toward the end of the book-length poem, Harjo writes, “It is heavier than the spirit who lifted up and flew.” The body is heavy without a soul, and the poet coming to terms with that, with her mother’s death, is powerful and relatable.
Ruddy Pascall
“Evangeliary” is defined on the book jacket of Philip C. Kolin’s Evangeliaries as “a book of only those portions of the Gospel, Acts of the Apostles, and Old Testament texts that would be read at a Mass.” It describes the books as “extremely ornate” with “highly emblematic covers.” Like its namesake, Evangeliaries is a collection of devotional works that adorn familiar scenes from Scripture, liturgical life and beyond, with richly descriptive yet accessible verse. The work is formally consistent, with short stanzas used almost exclusively throughout.
The anthology follows a loose narrative structure that embraces a throughline of biblical allusion while weaving in outside historical material. The poem “Faith” showcases this particular style: “A garden full of mustard seeds,/ St. Thérèse’s ‘Little Way’ to heaven./ Dame Julian singing, All will be well; All will be well.”
Kolin ends with a touching and often heartbreaking series of poems that grapple with death and old age. In “An Old Man Reflects on Job,” the narrator observes, “I take shorter steps on longer distances./ My body is stamped with brown red moles,/ a dated passport to enter life’s last country.” These poems serve as icons—functioning both as windows inviting the reader to gaze into deeper theological knowledge and as mirrors urging interior spiritual searching.
Edward Desciak
The concept of David Craig’s Dimestore Saints is straightforward: a collection of sonnets that chronologically retell the Gospel of Matthew. Craig does not muddle the message of the Gospel. He refers to the familiar settings and characters of the Bible: Nazareth, the Holy Family, the Apostles. Even in sonnets featuring more abstract images and experiences—like “the faceless penitential road” or a “day at the beach”—the emotional tone of Craig’s poetry is firmly connected to the Scripture it is inspired by.
While Craig is faithful to the source material, he weaves in modern references to make Matthew feel alive and timely. Alongside St. Peter and Bethlehem, Craig alludes to New York City, Paris, Walt Whitman, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday—a union of radically different faces and places that, in an interpretation of the Gospel, should not make sense but does.
The poems also translate Gospel verses into everyday scenarios familiar to a modern reader. “The poor don’t own their shirt, or their back./ They live downtown, might have a little dog,” he writes in the poem inspired by the Beatitudes. “They eat in soup kitchens—adjust in fog.” Craig intertwines the world of Jesus with the world we inhabit today and refuses to draw lines between the two.
Brigid McCabe
In Sarah Kay’s A Little Daylight Left, readers will find themselves on the streets of New York City, riding the L train or watching the “Times Square crowds” alongside the author. Kay describes the city as an experience rather than merely a place, allowing her readers to fully immerse themselves in the poetry’s landscapes.
The poems are steeped in a sense of nostalgia and contemplation, as if the author were beckoning her readers to sink into her memories. Kay grapples with her experiences at a transitional moment in her life, creating a cohesive collection through repetition of key themes: changing family relationships, gender dynamics, friendships and self-identity.
The book also explores how the writer herself uses poetry to process and understand these experiences. For Kay, there is always a distinct self-awareness of her role as a poet. In “Jello,” she writes, “The poem says, Be honest./ This is where you put/ everything you wish you could wrap your arms around—encircled with a ribbon of language, neatly packaged, handed off.”
Brigid McCabe
Written in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gary Fincke’s For Now, We Have Been Spared captures a moment of communal suffering and grief by grounding it in the personal and the individual. Each of Fincke’s poems tells an immersive story in which readers are invited to accompany characters through moments of great love, loss and longing. Some of the pieces engage with social commentary, like “On the Eve of the Presidential Election.” While it is unclear whether he is talking about the 2020 or 2024 election, Fincke tracks the mood of a country grappling with war and shoplifting (and shopping in general). He ends with the wistful and telling line, “Tomorrow half of these shoppers will not vote.”
While there are some specifically Christian references in the collection, most of Fincke’s poems speak to universal human experiences. In “Upon the Death of Sons: An Elegy,” the author describes a father who mourns the loss of a second son, while in “Missing: A Psalm,” he describes a mother’s relief at being reunited with her young son, who had wandered off and gotten lost.
With a striking combination of descriptive storytelling and vivid imagery, Fincke shows us how the most delicate and fleeting images, like that of “coiled clusters of Christmas lights” or of “raised shades of cloud,” can help us navigate the tenuous balance between mourning and hope.
Brigid McCabe
This article appears in November 2025.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts