lowercase gods by Christopher Nelson. Number 33 in our Robin Becker Chapbook Series, selected by series editor Steve Bellin-Oka.
[ cover image from the film Sacré Collège! (Cadinot, 1983) ]
Publication: March 16, 2026 [100 copies]
29 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-34-1
$ 12.00
Christopher Nelson’s poems stir the veils and silences of identity. “How many chances,” the speaker muses, “to break / the lock.” In fiercely and finely rendered stanzas, he gives form to essential questions like that: being a self, having a body, living in the fragrant and dangerous world. What sumptuous landscapes of attraction and hurt lowercase gods makes visceral and real.
—Richie Hofmann, author of The Bronze Arms
Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and six chapbooks, including Blue House, for which he received a New American Poets Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America, and Love Song for the New World (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a translation grant from the Goethe-Institut, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. He has edited two anthologies, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora—recipient of a Midwest Book Award—and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry.
The Command
He thought himself young
because he still felt
young and still knew the moods
of youth, as if
temporality—even
physicality itself—were
incidental. Put it in
your mouth, a command he liked
to whisper. Then the world
would pause, and he would turn
his head to see
out the window and be but
a man looking
at whatever chance happened to
reveal: fuchsia iridescence where
the gray of pigeons was,
and once, reflected back,
a man holding the head of
another man, as if they were
lovers, as if silence itself
was the question
and the answer
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