Through language both reverent and reckless, Katie Condon’s debut collection renders the body a hymn. Praying Naked is Eden in the midst of the fall, the meat of the apple sweet as sex. In this collection, God is a hopeless and dangerous flirt, mothers die and are resurrected, and disappointing lovers run like hell for the margins. With effortless swagger and confessional candor, Condon lays bare the thrill of lust and its subsequent shame. In poems brimming with “the desire / to be desired” by men, by God, by lovers’ other women, by oneself, she renders a world in which wildflowers are coated in ash and dark bedrooms flicker with the blue-light of longing. Our speaker implores like an undressed wound: “is it wrong to feel a hurt kind of beautiful?” Ecstatic and incisive, Praying Naked is a daring sexual and spiritual reckoning by a breathtaking new poet.
cover art by: Dorielle Caimi
“Praying Naked kicks ass and elbows the sky as Condon follows the desire that created her, a gift from her mother. Each prayer is a poem of sacred abandon. Condon is a poet who looks you in the eyes as she sings.”
“Katie Condon’s first collection of poems wrestles with belief and flesh in equal measure. God appears alongside lovers, the sacred alongside the profane, with desire—both the ecstasy and weight of it—woven inside and through it all...Beautiful, thrilling, strange, and surprising—a cautious celebration, a hopeful elegy. ”
“Big with Dawn” is included in the Academy of American Poets’ 100 Poems that Matter. The aim of the anthology is to bring new readers to the genre through “poems that examine the universal themes of love, loss, and the experiences that define us.”
“Big with Dawn” is included in the section “Poetry & Desire: Let’s Love Each Other on the Moon.”
“Riot” appears in What Things Cost: an anthology for the people, “the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century.” Edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones, What Things Cost, “collects stories that are honest, provocative, and galvanizing, sharing the hidden costs of labor and laboring in the United States of America.”
“Pamela Asks the Right Questions” and “On Nudity” appear in Hallelujah for 50ft Women,” an anthology whose aim is to celebrate women’s bodies in nuanced and complex ways, “leaving Barbie’s grotesque silent pliability in her box for good.”
