All Things Holy & Heathen

Praise for Chelsea C. Jackson

“I read Chelsea Jackson’s amazing debut collection, All Things Holy and Heathen, twice to savor its bodily vitality more deeply. Jackson is shameless and charming, brimming with suffering and healing. They are an inventor of names like ‘The One Whose Voice is Lullabies’ and ‘The One Whose Hands are Stained Red,’ and they speak with ‘wrung-out lungs screaming for salvation’ as they offer us ‘the universe’s sigil, infinite abundance.’ This book is music, is magic, is potent, is precious. Read it and rejoice.”
– Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2020.

“Visceral, vibrant, magically singular and seductive. Jackson’s imagination, style, and refreshing voice lull readers into their haunting world. We are grateful for the invitation into this chaotic realm of memory and reverie and want more and more.
– Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Fire Eater and Bad Mexican, Bad American.

“In All Things Holy and Heathen, Jackson sets down a winding path, walking with us as we pluck flowers for their familiar and just-on-the-tip-of-our-tongue aroma, and kick over rocks to inspect the slithering and crawling in the darkness underneath. In the end, it is impossible to come away from the page without feeling as though having peered through a looking glass—reflecting both outwardly, and within—to our future, and throughout our past.”
– Grim and Gilded