Praise for Holy the Body:

[E]xquisitely funny and magically solemn . . . —MAJOR JACKSON, author of Razzle Dazzle

[S]pirited and tender . . . poems of deep humor and pathos. —PHILIP METRES, author of Fugitive/Refuge

[P]ortrays innocence alongside violence before a return to innocence through clear-sighted recollections. —PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA, author of Kitchen Hymns

McAbee’s portrait of an open-handed, non-judgmental, big tent Christianity will appeal to all who seek connection . . . —KATE DANIELS, author of In the Months of My Son’s Recovery

[G]ems of faith, emotion, and longing . . . an apophatic theology that speaks to the holes in our hearts . . . —ERIKA MEITNER, author of Useless Junk

Holy the Body wrestles with ghosts and shadows, discovers Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee and Jesus’s tears in a trick of light. At once dark and humorous, these poems confront the religiosity of the US and explore the experience of faithful doubt, as God himself “goes under the knife.” The poems in this manuscript take the reader through the brutalities of the author losing his mother to melanoma and of resuscitating his own father, with “the cracking of sternum beneath my hands.” The collection chisels out a hard-earned language for the sacred, one which proclaims that the beauty we find in the midst of uncertainties is itself a solace that, as one of the final poems in the manuscript affirms, “is more than enough.”