Jessica Nirvana Ram’s Earthly Gods wrestles the angel of belief to our mundane sphere, incarnating as devotion to divinity and ancestors, shifting into a love wincing from the searing beauty of the world. From the tender renderings of a grandmother’s praying hands to incantations to the departed to the rivers that are the women throughout this book, these poems teem with diasporic wonderments and heartaches. Rituals described and deities invoked, Ram’s debut chants the sincerest ode of my own heart as the speaker prophesizes, “The marrow of your bones will sprout dandelions.” All I can see after reading this is a summer field filled with small petaled suns lifting up their heads from the green in praise.

                              -Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria

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In this remarkable debut, Ram maps a new kind of coming of age and reckons—through exacting narrative and inventive approaches to form—with the renovations required in divining one’s own mythology. As these poems tend gender, culture, and inheritances of many kinds, they also lend rare and well-crafted insight into how language accompanies us into a future we couldn’t know to expect.

                     -Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level