Now Available from Cascade Books
What does it mean to say yes?—to God, to the Spirit, to art, to love, to motherhood, to the dazzling & tangible world? Mary’s response to the angel, saying “Let it be to me as you have said,” is an essential moment in the life of a disciple, a woman, and an artist. In Madonna, Complex, Mary’s “yes” is a moment of opening, of allowing her very body to become a co-creator with God and a conduit for the coming of grace into the world. However, womanhood in all its fullness—sexuality, marriage, infertility, childbirth, nursing—inevitably complicates traditional Christian imagery of Mary. Madonna, Complex chronicles a feminine faith journey alongside saints like Joan of Arc and Saint Kateri, images of motherhood in visual art, through holy days of the Christian calendar—Ash Wednesday, Holy Saturday, All Saints Day—and sites of pilgrimage, cathedrals, wilderness, and other places holiness can be found. These poems explore the complexities of the messages we receive about what it means to say yes to God, or to something larger than ourselves that demands our attention and energy, whether it’s bearing a child or participating in a political protest.
“Jen Stewart Fueston’s poems embody the audacious kind of sainthood we need right now—muddied, carnal, ecstatic: possessed with an astonishment to stay awake.”
—Dave Harrity, author of These Intricacies
“Celebrating the mineral wonder of blood and miracle waters of birth, Fueston portrays the lives of women splayed by transfiguration, blinded by light ‘as we are caught / and reeled, held taut in the sweetening air.’ Hymns of quiet awe, Fueston’s contemporary psalms sing in the cityscapes of Istanbul to the high desert of Taos, flaming with savage beauty and holy desire.”
—Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Maze of Transparencies
“This is a collection of poems that has the pull of flowing waters finding their way toward the sea, . . . Throughout the collection, the poet reminds us that ‘love is not a fullness, it’s an ache,’ and in probing the endurances of that ache, helps us come to know ourselves as instances of a fragile but resilient beauty.”
—Mark S. Burrows, author of The Chance of Home: Poems
“In this stunning first collection, Jen Stewart Fueston invites us to join her pilgrimage as, turn after turn, she questions the structures we thought to be stable. . . . Together, these poems shake the foundations of belief to release it from the forms that have held it captive. So that we, too, might one day wander into ‘formless air’ and ‘call it holy.’”
—Kristin George Bagdanov, author of Diurne