The Gospel of Breaking

A powerful collection by a compelling queer Black poet.

In The Gospel of Breaking, Jillian Christmas confirms what followers of her performance and artistic curation have long known: there is magic in her words. Befitting someone who speaks things into being, Christmas extracts from family history, queer lineage, and the political landscape of a racialized life to create a rich, softly defiant collection of poems.

Christmas draws a circle around the things she calls
holy : the family line that cannot find its root but survived to fill the skies with radiant flesh; the body, broken and unbroken and broken and new again; the lover lost, the friend lost, and the loss itself; and the hands that hold them all with brilliant, tender care. Expansive and beautiful, these poems allow readers to swim in Jillian Christmas’s mother-tongue and to dream at her shores.

‘This book is a showcase of how many different ways a poet can show themselves to be dazzling.’
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us