Gospel Drunk

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