The Body in Advent—Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

We have invited Angela Alaimo O’Donnell to be the second of a pair of poets commissioned to write Advent poems for this Substack. (If you missed Tania Runyan’s excellent poems last week, read them here.) If you are new to the work of Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, read her interview with Ben Palpant or her Flannery O’Conner poems featured here as a Stack Takeover earlier this year.

Also, we’re running a holiday book promotion for the month of December. If you become a paid subscriber now, we’ll send you a thank-you book.

Now, on to the poem…

by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Advent comes, a needle in your heart.
Memory of the child in your belly,
learning the dark and demanding art
of sharing the space of your girl’s body
with a stranger who comes from nothing,
the impossible brewing inside of you.
What the gray biologists say
no match for the knowledge that in you sings,
a rhythm that throbs in the blood in your veins.
It says you will never be the same.
What happened to her has happened to you
and the her before her before her, too.
The child will come. Prepare the way
for one who comes but does not stay.

---

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City, and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. In addition, O’Donnell has published a memoir about caring for her dying mother, Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell; a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy; and a biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith. Her ground-breaking critical book on Flannery O’Connor Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, America, The Bedford Introduction to Literature (anthology), Christian Century, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 (anthology), Christianity & Literature, Contemporary Catholic Poetry (anthology), Flannery O’Connor Review, Italian Americana, Italian Poetry Review, Literary Matters, Mezzo Cammin, Peacock Journal, Presence, Reformed Journal, and Taking Root in the Heart (anthology), among others. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024.