Upon the Winter Solstice & Fourth Sunday of Advent Falling on the Same Day—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.

by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Deep into the beautiful season,
the feast of dark before the feast
of light. The baggage we have lugged
through the long year we now set
down, open up those cases shut tight,
filled with grievances and old grudges
that weigh us down, a leaden load
no creature should be cursed to carry.
Pick the lock, snap the hasps,
dump the debts you owe and are owed
into the river that purls and flows towards
mercy, where all waters meet and marry.
Leave your black bags by the lonely shore.
Walk away. You don’t need them anymore.

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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.