Description
What happens when the faith and community we once held close sours into an experience of tragedy? In Since Sunday, we find a poet who is rebuilding a sense of faith after fleeing religious abuse. Doubt, shame, uncertainty, and the pains of loss create the ground from which these poems grow. After severance from her religion, established values, and sense of direction, Tomaselli embarks on recovery as an active and intentional pursuit. The poems reveal a resilience that must be lived as a daily effort to cope with trauma and to root oneself in the present.
Through wit, vulnerability, and rich lyrical language, Tomaselli invites us to walk with her through loss and on to a persistent process of discovery. The poems chronicle a cultivation of awe, unearthing a fresh faith rooted in the present realness of everyday experiences. Stripped of the orthodoxy that both grew and crushed her, she reconstructs a new core of trust for herself. Here we learn with the poet to seek celebration in daily life and to foster a sense of beauty from the mundane.
Spare, both episodic and epigrammatic, as invested in mystery as in the quotidian, Brittany Tomaselli’s Since Sunday reads like a contemporary book of hours—except for hours, insert anxieties. . . . These poems seem the wind’s equivalent, offering a way through fear, past doubt, to the stay of belief, in the self, and in each small life’s possibilities. Tomaselli is a marvel. I’m so grateful for Since Sunday.
Carl Phillips, author of Wild is the Wind
Since Sunday is one of the most remarkable collections I’ve read in a long time––it’s a chapbook as big as the sky. This is actual seeing––what poetry forgot––and antennae-accurate hearing, which it can’t live without. With singular candor and deftness, Tomaselli summons a world on every page, like a mage with her scrying sphere––so she is. Hatless men, Reader, all––delight. Everything in Since Sunday is alive.
Lisa Fishman, author of The Happiness Experiment
“Since Sunday” reads like a succession of thematically linked, and brief, yet profound moments…[Tomaselli] precisely emphasizes a part of the conditional way that we think as humans…[approaching] this collection in a truly original and unprecedented manner…there is a solitude and reclusion from which the speaker seems to want to emerge and be visible, and also which she celebrates…I would term this a writerly collection of poems, and would encourage all readers and writers of poetry to pick up, and let the silence of the mind be filled with the grains of words and phrases which comprise it.
Emily Vogel, Ragazine
Reviews
About the Author
Brittany Tomaselli earned their MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Their work can be found in places such as jubilat, Fairy Tale Review, and The Wanderer. They currently live and work in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where they also keep bees and produce music.
