Earthly Gods (Jessica Nirvana Ram)

Jessica Nirvana Ram’s Earthly Gods wrestles the angel of belief to our mundane sphere, incarnating as devotion to divinity and ancestors, shifting into a love wincing from the searing beauty of the world. From the tender renderings of a grandmother’s praying hands to incantations to the departed to the rivers that are the women throughout this book, these poems teem with diasporic wonderments and heartaches. Rituals described and deities invoked, Ram’s debut chants the sincerest ode of my own heart as the speaker prophesizes, “The marrow of your bones will sprout dandelions.” All I can see after reading this is a summer field filled with small petaled suns lifting up their heads from the green in praise.

—Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria 

In this remarkable debut, Ram maps a new kind of coming of age and reckons—through exacting narrative and inventive approaches to form—with the renovations required in divining one’s own mythology. As these poems tend gender, culture, and inheritances of many kinds, they also lend rare and well-crafted insight into how language accompanies us into a future we couldn’t know to expect.

—Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level

In Earthly Gods, Jess Ram writes about family and legacy, religion and friendship, grief and food and sex and love, always love, with joy and wisdom and generosity and humor. She wields sensation—color, flavor, sound—like a painter, and she wields emotion just as deftly, moving in a few lines from gratitude to loss, from longing to sorrow, from pain to praise. The world is somehow made more vivid and arresting in these gorgeous, gripping poems, and as we read them, we are nodding and crying, we are laughing and snapping, newly aware of the richness and complexity of our own lives. This is a lush and layered debut, meant to be savored, in service of anyone who ever tried to figure out how to honor their inheritance and go their own way.

—Melissa Crowe, author of Lo

Emotionally complex but clear-eyed, Jessica Nirvana Ram’s poems hurtle through ‘acres of ache’ in search of ‘a balance, a boundary.’ Familial love amends and troubles. Grief is non-linear. Tradition enriches and separates. The language—gorgeous, incisive—braids shadows, lights. Bewilderment is transformative. Joy ripples with possibilities. Ram possesses an emotional and linguistic intelligence that startles the senses, that invigorats the heart.

—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine