“Chrusciel’s new collection faces up to a central experience of our time: can poetry, while remaining lyrically delicate, take on the grief and suffering of the age, the violence, the sorrow, the wars. It’s a poetry of exile and loss, of faith and the madness and hopes of our age. ‘One by one we become shades’; these poems are unflinching, profoundly moving while retaining a focused intellectual clarity and a precise and affirming language. Such language ‘Cracks God’s heart open.’ Chrusciel writes poems which are prayers that she wants to be like bats, ‘silky and fierce.’ This unique, attractive voice is playful, deeply serious, rewarding and enlightening. Chrusciel uses a richly wide breadth of reference, from our forms of clay to Jan van Eyck’s altarpiece with Annunciation to the female Greenland shark; and through all the work, accumulating one by one with convincing and engaging force, compassion and formal skill combine to create a kind of gospel, something that might echo the Gnostic and mystical Gospel of St. Thomas. A necessary collection for our times, humane, brilliantly imaginative, of Christian worth and meaning, and formally enthralling and various."

John F. Deane, author of “Dear Pilgrims”

“Chrusciel’s SQUALL CANTICLE is not a collection of poems as much as it is a spell book of angelic lemurs, grieving mothers, painted annunciations and hovering ash-bats, biting the page until they break the skin. Grief-rubbled, wondered-wounded, beauty-pricked, these poems pray and heave and storm and weep and, in the process, ‘break God’s heart open.’” 

Philip Metres, author of “Fugitive/Refuge”

“As our discourse grows less and less civil and more and more hostile to empathy—with some of the loudest voices calling it ‘toxic’ or even a ‘sin’—Chrusciel has written a book that both defends and beautifully enacts the practice of understanding others. Feeling someone else’s pain or worry or joy is an imaginative act, one that’s becoming increasingly harder to accomplish now that we have so many technologies that seem custom-designed to consume our attention. In SQUALL CANTICLE, Chrusciel pushes past those distractions and finds common threads of grief, uncertainty, and hope not just between human beings but also between humans and animals. As the title suggests, this is a swirling song of a book that will simultaneously startle and inspire you.”

James Davis May, the author of “Unusually Grand Ideas”