If I Were God I Would Also Start With Light (Gardner Dorton)

"Gardner Dorton’s If I Were a God I Would Also Start With Light actually springs forth from darkness; the gloom of being queer within a hostile family and community. We see how familial and religious trauma disrupt queer desire and limit later opportunities for love, acceptance, and joy. The speaker of these poems undertakes the sizable quest of finding alternative role models in order to reconstruct the desire that has been long denied. Dorton turns our heads towards art, drops us into the eye of the storm as his speaker navigates mental illness, and suspends us in moments equally jarring and intimate to illustrate that the journey to “sheer, queer joy” requires resilience, a different kind of faith than the one we are taught."

—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

"Dorton’s poetry is courageous as much as it is emotional. In this collection, a gentle soul fights for survival, and along the way has picked up a remarkable gift of poetry to protect himself. His writing braves the fearful darkness of life, and hands life back over to us, still raw, yet somehow undeniably beautiful, a miracle in language."

—Nicholas Goodly, author of Black Swim

"Gardner Dorton’s collection of poems If I Were God I Would Also Start With Light is a first baptism where we are reminded that there is “phlegm and violence in every prayer.” Dorton is grabbing our hand and guiding us through the church, through the field, through the “hollow landscapes,” through all the places queerness lives in danger. There is so much space in between each poem, room for us to walk around and grow, to turn away from the trauma of both God and family in order to learn how to love. This collection teaches us how to sing through our sadness; that there might always be something worth praying to, often it is not God but love itself."

—jason b crawford, author of YEET! and Year of the Unicorn Kidz