CONCRETE VERONICAS: A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of reading two books by Kathy Shaidle, alias Relapsed Catholic. I’ve been meaning to tell you all about them. Right now I’m underslept and overstressed, so this is not going to be eloquent; maybe the best advertisement I can give is to note that I’ll be buying extra copies of both books to send to friends.

The first one I read, God Rides a Yamaha: Musings on Pain, Poetry, and Pop Culture, is a small book, enticingly purse-sized, collecting 24 of Shaidle’s essays plus an introduction. The essays roam and graze: vignettes, slogans, sharp observations, quotations from TS Eliot, Simone Weil, and Dolly Parton. The rambliness makes some of the essays feel slight–especially in the second half of the book, which is less focused. (The first half focuses more tightly on Shaidle’s diagnosis with lupus.) But Shaidle can nail the experience of chronic sickness, religious struggle (I picture someone not so much wrestling an angel, more throwing punches), and that weird “running with the hare and hunting with the hounds” attitude of Christians who find ourselves deeply embedded in pop culture. You can also tell she’s a poet, from scattered phrases (“a sweatshop of psalms”) and an attention to images (from a sharp little riff on political radicalism: “I once blabbed on about how the root of the word ‘radical’ is, well, ‘root.’ Today I see that there’s a nasty implication in there somewhere, to the effect that roots are somehow more important than, say, flowers”).

So yeah. These are really good. Meditations on x-rays and illness as Lent; sunglasses at night; Ed Wood, healing hairdressers, “grow your own hairshirt” and the “Vancouver of the soul.” Read and learn “How to be sick, unemployed, and insane.” Among other things.

So next I read Shaidle’s book of poetry, Lobotomy Magnificat. I’ve been describing it to people this way: “You know how a lot of Eliot is like, Take poetry and then hit it really hard until it breaks? Well this is like hitting Eliot until it shatters even more.” Short violent poems that take a long time to read. Amazing imagery–in the title poem Rosemary Kennedy, prepped for her lobotomy, notes, “they have set my hair free.” It’s hard to quote from the poems because Shaidle’s pacing is so perfect. The poems are unsettling, often heartbreaking, without an unnecessary word.

She posted her poem on Flannery O’Connor here. It’s really good, but not the best one in this collection–beaten out by “A Summer Thunderstorm Considered as the Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” or “Lobotomy Magnificat,” “Evelyn Speaks,” “The Missionary Performs an Exorcism,” “I’ll Cry Tomorrow: Lillian Roth at the Well.” The images twist, warping the way the world warped at the Fall–at first glance you think those phrases are absurdism, surrealism, but really the proper genre is often horror.

You can buy both books from Amazon here.