Publisher's Synopsis
THE RAINDROP'S GOSPEL: THE TRIALS OF ST. JEROME AND ST. PAULA is the winner of the Ninth Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. It is a novel in verse chronicling the lives of St. Jerome and St. Paula. In the afterword to the book, Chris Abani had this to say: Feminist, heretical, apocryphal, theological, inspirational, this book is as much about art and the artist's attempt to render the ineffable as it is about the specificity of the lives of the two saints. Even its take on feminism is heretical. Instead of attempting an alternative construction of the strong female, the book comes at this politics from the position of the male, underpinning the fragility of masculinity, and thus emphasizing so beautifully the strength of women.
