IF I WERE GOD I WOULD ALSO START WITH LIGHT

Written by: Gardner Dorton

Published by: Thirty West Publishing House

  • "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

  • "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

  • "In Gardner Dorton's sublime, Appalachian debut, a modern oracle speaks from the desert of grief, boyhood, and violence. In sharp, precise language drawing from scripture and from place, Dorton asserts the importance of a single question, of small miracles. The importance of seeing then waiting. Like Jericho marching around the city walls in defiance or Job abiding in his dejection from God, Dorton speaks to the power of transfiguration through the erotic, through self determination, and through queer self actualization. Here, one finds wings among the carnage and emerges with a new, vibrant, whole-life, a "second / chance" of grace and redemption. This is a haunting collection from a memorable new voice

    Halle Hill