THE RESURRECTION APPEARANCES: FRAGMENTS OF A DAYBOOK

ISBN 978-1-938900-53-2
Release Date: Spring 2024
Perfect-bound, 114 pages. 5.3″x7″
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SYNOPSIS

THE RESURRECTION APPEARANCES: FRAGMENTS OF A DAYBOOK is an account of a grief year, told through narrative, lists, dreams, poetry, fantasy, and recollections of childhood. Beginning after the sudden death of the author’s mother, Patty, Resurrection spans the first six months of grief and reaches back to the author’s earliest memories. The book has a wide tonal range, encompassing parenting, queerness, prayer, the spiritual possibilities in work for justice, and the meaning of healing from trauma in a voice reminiscent of Emerson Whitney’s Heaven and Sophia Shalmiyev’s Mother Winter: subtle, sensitive, and restless in its desire for authenticity. Picking through the shambles of grief, RESURRECTION tests the comforts of faith and narrative and attempts to give shape to a life.

PRAISE

Through a series of short, lyric entries, Jay Aquinas Thompson records the loss of their beloved Patty, a mother like “a brittle blade-edge,” who worked as a psychiatric nurse, loved film, and sometimes had both “a beautiful singing voice” and a hundred-dollar bottle of rum. THE RESURRECTION APPEARANCES: FRAGMENTS OF A DAYBOOK builds a spiritual tractatus in the voice of a poet who played caregiver to a caregiver. Each entry offers a sense of beginning again—a new way to parse a parent’s death alongside the life she lived and the possible ways to live afterwards. Thompson returns consistently to the question “Where do you find faith?” while gesturing toward the answer in images, meditations, and confessions that offer us “a momentary sense of the universe’s scale.”
—Sarah Minor, author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit and Bright Archive

AUTHOR

Jay Aquinas Thompson (they/he) is a poet, essayist, critic, and teacher who’s published work in Neon Door, Passages North, Jubilat, Adroit, Guesthouse, and Poetry Northwest, where they’re a contributing editor. They’ve been awarded grants and fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Community of Writers, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and King County 4Culture. They live with their child in Seattle, where they teach creative writing to public school students and incarcerated women.

DESIGNER

Book design by David Wojciechowski.