This Persistent Gravity by Angie Crea O’Neal

The Old Testament, the history of poetry, “the thrumming music of bodies”: Angie Crea O’Neal’s superb new collection contains multitudes and rewards numerous careful readings. These are poems to fall into and wander, as many-roomed as heavenly mansions. Together, they comprise what will surely be among the year’s most auspicious debuts.

–Graham Hillard, Editor, Cumberland River Review

In Angie Crea O’Neal’s vibrant first collection This Persistent Gravity, she guides us with a sensitive hand through the difficulties and fears of single motherhood and the joys and losses time brings. She invites us to “climb the streets of your childhood, the place / that still holds you, haunts you like a dream” in search of wisdom and truth. These poems contain the mundane and small – laundry, Mayflies, playing in the hose in the summer—alongside the philosophies of Milton, Hopkins, and the Holy Bible, and lead us “Back to paying attention as / we listen for the lonesome shrill of a night / train in the distance, its promise of going home.”

–Renee Emerson, author of Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2022)