devotion, detached, by Aurelia Harrison

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This is a chapbook of poems about religious experience. From conversations with prophets to promises made over drinks, devotion, detached is a reflection on the relationships between human and sacred. This project is one born of a desire on the author’s part to talk to holy things. Arranged as a thematic continuum, devotion, detached draws inspiration from religious traditions, stories, and histories current and past. In interrogating what it means to have a relationship with the divine, these poems are attempts to become more familiar with the lived experience of religion, and to figure out what it might mean to “be religious”.

Religion, as past civilizations thought of it, is not a facet of life: it is life itself. These poems seek to engage in a conversation with this intimate relationship between religion and embodied existence—that struggle we face as people trying to parse the divine while limited by our humanity. This is my love letter to religion. I hope it will love me back.

Aurelia Harrison is a believer in luck and a follower of signs from the universe. They have recently learned that God exists in other people and that the work of living is to care for one another. They are currently studying Religion and English at Vassar College. devotion, detached is their first chapbook.