Tregenna Hill

“As priest transforms bread into body, Caitlin Smith Gilson transforms reality into language. For Gilson, writing poetry is an act of apprehending the distinctiveness of every human experience . . . . In her art of representation, each phenomenon is laden with universal meaning, is something of a sacred event of undefinable significance. Her response to the phenomena of being, Eliotic and allusive but ever original, is nothing less than a passion of awe.”


—Cicero Bruce, Dalton State College





“This book of poems . . . is about the pathways of the profane to the sacred, about how grace destroys and redeems nature, about how the susurration of transcendence in our very bodily lives cannot be satisfied with merely spiritual meaning. . . . Gilson’s very disciplined philosophical and theological reflections never cease to surprise and often give way to an incandescent poetics. . . . For Gilson, philosophy/theology and poetry are but two different sides of ecstatic register of speech.”


—Cyril O’Regan, University of Notre Dame





“Gilson deftly employs a quite-daring sacramental coupling of the sacred and the erotic, retrieving once-familiar biblical and liturgical guideposts with the startling freshness and in-between of lovers, . . . the immediacy of peering through the lattice, where the line between leisurely gazing and having license to stare is blurred, wherein I no longer know where I end and you begin, thereby witnessing anew to the very incarnational faith that cries out with astonishment, ‘Caro cardo salutis.’”


—Patrick Ryan Cooper, Saint Martin’s University