Appetite for the Divine   (April 2010)


By Christine Gelineau

ISBN: 978-0-912592-68-8

 Available at: Amazon | Small Press Distribution

Appetite for the Divine is the 2009 selection for the McGovern Series.

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“Christine Gelineau has invented a new cosmology in her fascinating, ambitious, multi-part poem, Appetite for the Divine.  Questioning contemporary warfare and eco-destruction while praising the green fuse in all that lives, this poet interrogates, celebrates, and re-calibrates our spiritual and cultural values.  Gelineau models for us a marvelously poly-voiced poetry, an associative, gently narrative puzzle which allows her to pick through scenes of destruction and illumination toward an idea of a core of holiness in our 21st-century existence.  In Appetite for the Divine, Gelineau makes time into the sublime and turns space into grace.”

– Molly Peacock


“Christine Gelineau’s second book of poems, Appetite for the Divine, more than confirms the promise of her first. In these new poems about ‘the world we’re prepared/to perceive,’ Gelineau’s appetite for the divine is neither of the traditionally religious nor the hazy romantic kind; rather it is a desire for the integration of life and death, for things as they are with things as they could be.  The book’s opening epigraph invokes Rilke, with whom Gelineau finds commonality, celebrating the divine within the human, offering us poems of precision and passion whose desire for life on earth and earthly transcendence arrive in equal proportion.”

– Neil Shepard


“In this series of long poems Christine Gelineau brings us the poetry of awakening, perception, birth, and seasons as well as loss, tragedy, and despair and shows that the whole universe beats with one heart (‘the systole-diastole of the cosmos’) as language somehow pursues truth (‘In the absence/ of answers meaning/ may yet find space/ to emerge’) where all things are a tale in themselves.  Of the human reaching for understanding she asks questions which only the cosmos can answer: ‘What satiation would Eve have imagined/ as her teeth cleaved the apple?//What were we made for/ if not this appetite for the divine?’”

– Deborah Fleming


About the Author

Christine GelineauChristine Gelineau's first full-length collection, Remorseless Loyalty, won the Richard Snyder Publication Prize and was published by Ashland Poetry Press in 2006.The book was subsequently nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award by David St. John.  Gelineau is also the author of two chapbooks of poetry, North American Song Line and In the Greenwood World (both from Foothills Publishing).  Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely.  Gelineau is the associate director of the Binghamton Center for Writers, State University of New York.  She teaches literature and creative writing at Binghamton University and also teaches in the low-residency MA/MFA in Writing Program at Wilkes University.  She and her husband raise Morgan horses under the Hartland prefix on a farm in upstate New York. http://christinegelineau.com/

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