Jessica Walsh’s Book of Gods and Grudges tells a tale of generational trauma and transcendence. She declares early on that My first kin were killers, people for whom burnout was a luxury they could not afford. Her speaker struggles through illness and sobriety and grappling with God as a problem she tries to solve as she finds her own calling. The poems are unflinchingly honest and impeccably crafted. They show us what it means to stay flagrantly alive.

-Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems