artwork by Whitney Schlander
forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (2023)
The Old Testament, the history of poetry, “the thrumming music of bodies”: Angie Crea O’Neal’s superb new collection contains multitudes and rewards numerous careful readings. These are poems to fall into and wander, as many-roomed as heavenly mansions. Together, they comprise what will surely be among the year’s most auspicious debuts.
-Graham Hillard, Editor, Cumberland River Review
In Angie Crea O’Neal’s vibrant first collection This Persistent Gravity, she guides us with a sensitive hand through the difficulties and fears of single motherhood and the joys and losses time brings. She invites us to “climb the streets of your childhood, the place / that still holds you, haunts you like a dream” in search of wisdom and truth. These poems contain the mundane and small – laundry, Mayflies, playing in the hose in the summer—alongside the philosophies of Milton, Hopkins, and the Holy Bible, and lead us “Back to paying attention as / we listen for the lonesome shrill of a night / train in the distance, its promise of going home.”
– Renee Emerson, author of Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2022)
angie crea o'neal 