Gospel Drunk follows a speaker's journey to find clarity and identity as he contemplates his Catholic upbringing and struggles with loneliness and alcohol addiction. Sharp, intoxicating imagery and a minimalist aesthetic combine in these poems to explore some of our darkest and strongest belief systems, dismantling them with wit and wisdom. Poignant boyhood memories of hockey coaches as "dragons in suits" collide with critiques of "the broken bicycle of recovery." A child's fingers interlace to form a gun during mass and Hulk attends an AA meeting. Boldly honest, Gospel Drunk is for all who seek humanity in a world where the personal and the political are equally complicated. He drops a match on his wound to set fire to his blood. At a certain temperature even the Devil cools. -from "Drowning Man Sonnets" A poet's struggle for identity and salvation in the face of religious dogma and alcoholism. "The poems in Gospel Drunk transfigure hockey bros, hazing rituals, and the warmest parking lot in Canada into a bioluminescence of interconnections. By drawing upon the personal, Chafe is able to write with pointed authority to the central struggle of our age: the structural abuses of faith. Redefining the dowry of religion's aftermath, Chafe crafts work out of reason and imagination, showing how metaphor can help carry us across the turbulence of our times." "At the heart of Aidan Chafe's impressive sophomore collection is a bare-knuckle interrogation of organized, patriarchal religion. Languishing in the space between faith and doubt, the speaker of Gospel Drunk gives himself over to awe and observation, exploring violence, masculinity, addiction, and structural injustice in lyrics that are sonorous, deliberate, and searching." # 10 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, October 10, 2021 I 2 Disciple 3 Galileo 4 Trust 5 Helmets and Gloves 6 Social Development 7 Ode to the Hockey Bro 8 Churches, Trucks and Shallow Pools 10 Driving Through Kitsilano 11 Suburban Lament 12 Two Lips 13 Fall of the Empire 14 Meditation on Enclosed Space 16 This Might Be the Warmest Parking Lot in Canada 17 Another Seasonal Poem 19 We Are Bioluminescent 20 Passage II 22 Struggling Protagonist 23 Indelible 24 Sizing Up 25 The Light Salesmen 26 Prayer in the Age of Unreason 27 Mary Too 29 Sacrificial Sons 31 Eternal Optimist 33 Land in the Name of Taking 34 Suffering as Spectacle 35 Holes 36 Hard Rain 37 Sonnet in Defence of Lust 38 Nothing Written Is Sacred III 40 Gun Journal 47 Safety Rules 48 The Strongman 49 The Activist 50 Eyes of the Assailant 51 Good Men 52 Colonial Chokehold 53 Fallen 54 Superhero AA 55 Epistle of the Inebriate 56 Empty 57 Ode to Ruin 58 Drowning Man Sonnets 73 Notes 75 Acknowledgements

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