The Gospel of God Boy

In this achingly honest collection, McCurry holds up the first question humans dared ask God as a mirror until God and man, stone and embrace, story and truth resist borders. The Gospel of God Boy haunts the reader, holding them before that mirror until their boundaries, too, begin to falter. McCurry handles the harsh reality of the human experience with such careful keeping that even his rawest, most visceral moments feel soft, vulnerable, in need of protection.

Christopher McCurry's The Gospel of God Boy is poetry for contemporary America. The poems use the genre designations Christian scriptures—Gospel, Apocrypha, Revelation, Parable, Prophecy—and the mythic structures of brother stories (Cain and Abel, the older brother and the younger brother) to tell domestic and mundane stories about what we owe each other and how we fail one another. Despite their constant nod to theological and religious narrative structures, the language is sparse, common, antitheological, and antipoetic, except to the extent that it is tied to the world of the bodily senses. At their heart, underneath the irony and absurdist humor, lies a deep and tender empathy, lies a heart broken by the pain of the world.

The poems in Christopher McCurry's The Gospel of God Boy are stunning and I mean that literally. There's so much power in the images, the lines, the poems, yet it's a tender strength, a velvet-gloved fist delivering knockout after knockout—such a riveting narrative from beginning to end.

The poems in The Gospel of God Boy build a gripping biomythography, a term Audre Lorde used in combining history, biography, and myth to build a personal story from many sources. McCurry's mesmerizing story-poems feature heart-rending language—both biblical and colloquial—and challenge readers to unearth what it means to be a sibling, child, spouse, parent, and teacher. The remarkable, musical, and memorable voices in these strikingly crafted poems are haunting and dare us to reconsider the honesty of our own biomythographies.

With The Gospel of God Boy, Christopher McCurry makes the subject of Guilt extremely palpable. personal. devout. This is a collection of flagellations—self-inflicted insights superimposed by familial relationships: The razor blade / reeks of torn meat / stinks of origin / the first stone / cracked open in heat. the cheap trick would be for us to call this collection epiphanous, but McCurry digs so deeply his animus that even moments of stark blasphemy reek with a sense of pure enlightenment—and this is how he brings us to Revelation. He says let there be birds / He wants to be understood literally.... He runs / a red light. A bit of recklessness / is just what he needs before / punching the clock. McCurry's writing here clings to the timeless notion of Apocrypha, but The Gospel of God Boy is how poetry rightfully articulates and represents its own private Genesis—every stanza a tithe, each confession an altar.