In What We Do with God, Daniella Toosie-Watson collapses the division among humans, the natural world, and the divine.
Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection meditates on the politics of mental health, pleasure, and the natural world. In this book, the everyday miracles of insects are studied, celebrated, and made sacrosanct. Prayer and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Propriety has no bearing on sensual connection and exploration. The poet calls upon Puerto Rican, Iranian, and Russian inheritance to explore where, why, and how ancestral mysticism and Western pathology intersect and/or diverge. The speaker finds those questions mirrored back as they maneuver through the stark realities of the US mental health care system.
What We Do with God dives into the grotesque, the bestial, the surreal, as a means to defamiliarize abuse. Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection is a practice of reclamation.
With an unapologetic impiety to holiness and waywardness, What We Do with God invites readers to enter a world where care extends beyond ourselves and those closest to us to ecosystems holding the wider world together.
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“These poems are sharp and precise, and the engine of them, I believe, is generosity—the generosity of Daniella Toosie-Watson, who sees the poem inside of the poem, sees the poem within the smallest insect, the smallest moment on the television screen that you do not see. What a gift this book is.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
“God and sex are not at war but intertwined, are of a piece. Expect only the utterly unexpected. Even the titles startle, as in ‘e Dead Rat Will Remind You of Your Dad and You Won’t Sleep for Weeks.’ After reading this, I won’t. Toosie-Watson writes, ‘Love is not a coward,’ and upon reading this astonishing first book, you will know: neither is she.” —VIEVEE FRANCIS, author of The Shared World
“Do not mistake the whimsy and irreverence blooming through this collection as a lack of gravity—it is quite the opposite. These poems reinforce how brutally essential a playful imagination is to reckon with a deadly world where faith and grace are hard-earned. Toosie-Watson has compiled a glorious collection burning bright with a wild wit and an even more ferocious wisdom.”
—Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages
“What We Do With God is a book of thresholds, with each poem mapping a divine passage in the body into language. Grounded, intimate, and embodied, these poems alchemize the mysterious tension between body and spirit—to revel in being vulnerable to become holy, to experience the tenderness of God in the mundane, to know mercy by knowing oneself. This is a luminous collection; Toosie-Watson is a transformational poet.”
—Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, author of Magical Realism