Thompson, Jay Aquinas: The Resurrection Appearances: Fragments of a Daybook

Gold Line Press, paperback

Publication Date: January 9, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 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. "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 Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Hybrid. LGBTQ+ Studies.