My Personal Favorite with Rachel Custer
Happy launch day, Rachel!
Hi Everyone,
Hope all is well!
This poetry blog only asks the poet to answer one two-part question:
At this moment, which of your own poems is your personal favorite, and why?
Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Rachel Custer to the blog on the launch day for her amazing new book, Mercy, published by Monday Editions.
Thanks to X.P. Callahan for putting us in touch!
Enjoy!
Kelly
Rachel’s response:
I’m not sure if faith makes its adherents weird, or if only weird people believe, but I like this poem because it embraces the language, imagery, and questions raised by the bizarre.
I like the imagery: a womanless wig, a hen baring her teeth, teeth like a broken fence. I like the verbs: the wig tumbleweeds, the sign grins, the church squints. Mostly, I like the characters: God sets you down cussing, a whole child runs from a disabled child, you laugh like a maniac, and God?
God silently waits.
I like the questions raised by this poem, and the fact that I raised them. I am a person of faith, but it’s important to challenge one’s faith, in my opinion. Faith unchallenged is like a muscle unworked—it can never grow strong.
Finally, I like the reality of the poem. The hard truth of it. Sometimes the church is predatory. Sometimes the truth seems inexplicable. Sometimes God is silent.
So we laugh.
Mercy, available TODAY! from Monday Editions, is the third collection by Rachel Custer, NEA Poetry Fellow (2019) and author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017) and Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books, 2023). Mercy takes us into the hearts and minds of a hardscrabble town’s residents as they engage with the books they borrow from a Little Free Library (sometimes throwing shade at Ruth and Naomi, the women who set the library up).
You can purchase Mercy here. And Rachel’s other books on Bookshop here and Amazon here.
***
If you have a poem you would like to have featured on My Personal Favorite, please message me here on Substack.
And if you happen to be in France this spring, I will be the Resident Fellow at VCCA’s Moulin à Nef location from March through May. Feel free to reach out!
I would love to see you.
Cheers,
Kelly
Thank you, Kelly! Rachel Custer is an amazing poet, and her work deserves a wide audience.
My first introduction to Rachel's work is this collection, and I know I will read her poetry again, she's that good. I like everything about "Mercy," from its dynamite cover to the marvelous characters and their words within. Those personas address deep questions and speak the kinds of truths you don't often find these days. The books associated with them are perfect. I'm old enough to recall the times when bookmobiles came to the neighborhood. Browsing the books in Rachel's collection was a delightful romp with memories.