When an atheist says bless you

When an atheist says bless you takes the reader deeper into the strange terrain covered by Jolly’s first collection, Why ice cream trucks play Christmas songs.

These poems begin in familiar surroundings: newspaper clippings, snippets of history, Bible stories, and scenes embedded in our psyches such as an elementary school hallway. Their fulfillment, though, crosses into a place where Charles Darwin apologizes to Adam in Eden, or chants Jabberwocky to himself. A place where the stonemasons who build a cathedral abstain from swearing, and that abstinence is felt as a palpable blessing centuries later. A place where two patients who share a hospital room also share a clipboard with mingled notes for doctors and chaplains.

This place, though surprising, is also oddly familiar. Maybe this is, after all, the world where we live. Maybe, with Jolly’s help, we can see it for the first time.