Lisa B’s powerful opening poem, “GOD NO. 2” in her new collection, God in Her Ruffled Dress, sets the stage for what’s to come: a God as expansive as the imagination, a God that comes through our energy and emotions and insights, and a God based on earthly sensuality and experiences. A playful God.

What also emerges from these poems is a God whose only limits might be the metaphors we can create. She is aware that presenting this God is also a challenge to that limited, dusty, male God whose authority weighed over Adam and Eve (and generations of humans, even now). In “Genesis,” she writes:
The beings who sang at the true creation of the world
stand witness again,
their faces recalling the face of the God
who hovered over the waters. I come into my hand
and breathe out a mist
which rests on my face, my own face,
like God’s, the one I know.

This God is not prescriptive, not found stuck in a book but comes through direct experience.
Here, “Genesis” is an invitation to experience “God as the one I know.”

The physical body is embraced as a place of knowing and mystery, illness, sex, and healing. Lisa B uses her experience of living with Type 1 Diabetes to convey the intimate edge between life and death. As someone who also lives with Type 1, I’ve never encountered poetry that captures the way it feels to experience daily blood sugar highs and lows that put us in mortal danger. In ‘”The Interesting Thing About Diabetes,” she writes:
is that you are often dying
but not really, knowing you can stop death this time
with three tabs of glucose
like Christ administering a sacrament

This almost dying becomes a kind of spiritual practice, a preparation for death:
as the sugar dissolves down your throat
and the blood pulses in your cells like fingers clicking on
a distant keyboard, as you become aware of your solid bones

Reverence for the strange and magical possibilities of existence weave through each section of this volume. We also encounter the poetry of Lisa B’s jazz music (she is also a singer), of her pandemic response to the former President and the fears and ills of that time, and a section about the female body’s worth for more than procreation.

God In Her Ruffled Dress closes with “Lisa’s Lord’s Prayers”, a triumphant call to bless each other (including her cats) and recognize the sacredness inherent in life:
Thy time has come,
thy will be done
in action as in dreaming.

Read this volume of poems as a reminder of what you know: that in our existence there is not only meaning but the right for our bodies and souls to experience joy and pleasure, to release old ghosts both in our epigenetics and in our stories; that we can imagine and name the mysterious and sometimes intimate life force that some call God.