Eve and Other Acts of Defiant Gratitude

Here the world is turned upside down to meet our eyes staring downward instead of upward, and outward. Here poems meet you where you are, and return your vision to a world loaded with wonders and laughter, if you’ll just take a few moments to look and listen and breathe it all in. That’s one way of explaining the joys, surprises, and detours that you’ll find in Eve and Other Acts of Defiant Gratitude. In Donohue’s new work of poems and prose poems, all personal history and all life itself is seen as a continuum of elliptical conjunctions. The past and the present, magic and loss, creation and cremation coexist. Shakespeare and Texas Cafeterias, Michael Cohen and John Donne, Joni Mitchell and conversations stored in a giant freezer. In these pages, people and events are all conjoined because in Donohue’s retelling, and reconfiguring of The Garden of Eden story, Eve be-comes the way to all creation in this world, the progenitor of love and art. Her decision isn’t just consequential, it’s courageous, and wondrous and liberating. While Adam was content to laze about and name the animals in The Garden, Eve wanted to taste creation itself. Because of Eve, we know that in the syntax of the soul, there is no handwriting that misspells our desire to share ourselves with another, to become love. In this book, even when life has defied our expectations, we see how we can defy it back with an act of discovery and a sense of gratitude.