Novena

Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize Series

by Jacques J. Rancourt

In poems inspired by and sometimes borrowing their forms from the novena, a nine-day Catholic prayer addressing and seeking intercession from the Virgin Mary, Jacques Rancourt explores the complexities of faith, desire, beauty, and justice. Novena is a collection that invites prayer not to symbols of dogmatic perfection but to those who are outcast or maligned, LGBTQ people, people in prison, people who resist, people who suffer and whose suffering has not been redeemed. In Novena, the Virgin Mary is recast as a drag queen, religious icons are merged with those who are abolished, and spiritual isolation is scrutinized in a queer pastoral.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Gay

88 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2017

About the author

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of two full-length collections, Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017), as well as a chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). Raised in Maine, he lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Jenesis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning and palpable imagery. Jacques's ability to convey an idea in just a few words is beautiful: "He's grown older, my father, / his face an echo." I may not have always been able to connect to the message or the backstory of the poem, but I always felt the emotion of the words. Beautiful!

[Michelle Hoogterp · Rating 5 out of 5]

powerful imagery.

[Burnside Soleil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe attend church less and sit outside, reading this collection aloud.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few poems I really liked and definitely a line or two from each poem was beautiful but overall a mixed bag for me.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I've searched for a word
that means what I meant it to - how we are a part
of the world as much as we are apart from it -
and it does not exist." - Jacques J. Rancourt, "The Same Word"


As gently as a doe leading her fawn, Rancourt leads the reader into a world that accepts the futility of human connection even as it embraces those connections, that accepts that the things we do not have the language for are also our responsibility to find the language for. This book is that finding - and threaded through it are Drag Queen Virgin Mary, male sirens, landscapes haunted by animal carcasses and the specters of memory. Rancourt's poems expose and revel in the fact that even the best parts of life are, ultimately, just another form of decay.