Review: The Gospel of Breaking by Jillian Christmas // Margaryta Golovchenko

Many of us have personal rituals when it comes to reading; a favourite spot where we like to sit, or some other habit that turns off our connection to our surroundings and allows us to immerse ourselves fully inside a book. Sometimes it is the book itself that begs a specific pacing or approach, like how some books make you feel like it is wrong to rush through them. This is the affective side of ritual: ritual that is simultaneously personal because it is particular to an individual, and an intimate partnership between the reader and the writer. 

In the case of Jillian Christmas’s debut, The Gospel of Breaking is not a book one reads as much as it is a book one has the privilege of listening to. From the last lines of the opening poem “a home I can only leave once” —

are you one dear reader a body

that would gather

next to mine erase the line

for a moment

so that urgent truth can be born

on new lips

— Christmas invites us into the home of her speaker who inhabits the collection’s pages. We become guests; witnesses who listen, enthralled, as the poems chart an expansive territory from the internal, confessional world of the speaker, to charting familial, political, and cultural trajectories that culminate in the speaker, “one sweet plump strange girl learning to tend herself.” 

The Gospel of Breaking feels a little like the poetic equivalent of musical scales, where we are given a glimpse at Christmas’s wide diapason, her reach of style and subject matter. There is no singularity but the speaker’s own fierce existence in Christmas’s collection, whether fighting a feminism that preaches “how sweetly and happily / dark bodies take to making kindling” or tenderly celebrating the mother-daughter relationship in “In My Mind There is a Place Where We are Both Whole.” In “Do Not Feed,” this fierceness is wielded to challenge social perceptions of anger in a world that “wants me begging / and always saying thank you / when I’ve had enough.” “The Bike Poem” embraces fierceness and one cannot help but laugh at the speaker’s sharp aim at

the douche-canoe

who will likely never understand the significance

of the electric jon sticker that straddled the

crossbar of my beloved steed.

There is no definitive way one can, or should, classify The Gospel of Breaking. Instead, Christmas is an oracle who gives each person what they need, imbuing the act of reading with reverence while constantly keeping us aware of the relationality that is at play on several levels in the collection.  

If The Gospel of Breaking can be called theatrical, then it is only insofar that it takes a certain directness and bravery, the kind where self-consciousness is stripped away until the honesty of the words is coupled with a sense of undeniable presence. There are many moments I could choose from here as an example, but doing so would require ripping things out of context in a way that would not convey the flow of the collection, something that can only be conveyed when one is already neck-deep in Christmas’s poems. They push the limits of the body by revealing how it is always ebbing and flowing, ready to explode, assuming a physical and emotional as well as a cultural and familial existence. 

Similarly, I often anticipated the gentle intake of breath in the spaces that Christmas frequently makes use of in her poems to create this sense of proximity and physicality that is so palpable in The Gospel of Breaking. Christmas’ poems are corporeal, living, waiting to inhabit a bodily form. There is a transition from page to voice that I hope someday to be able to witness, my own little hope for a post-COVID future. When I reach the final lines of Christmas’ debut — “yes / I thought this / is love” — I am overcome by the same sort of internal hush that I have witnessed sitting in a theatre, hoping to stay a little longer in the space of celebration.