until you know what God is
After a Catholic priest compared them to a dog for being queer, a fourteen-year-old Liz stomped away not only from the church but any spiritual exploration period. If the God they were told to worship doesn’t recognize the fullness of their own soul, why should they care for the fullness of God?
As they grew into their twenties, the need for spiritual centering started beating at the edge of Liz’s heart. And when learning about Quakerism and the faith’s more open-ended interpretation of God, a new question ripped wide open: what is God? Is it possible there’s something beyond the angry white man in the sky they thought God was supposed to be?
Through these poems, Liz explores that question as widely as their spirit will take them and invites you to do the same.
This is a gorgeous, complicated, contradictory, riotous romp into the unknowable, and I will be recommending it to everyone that I know. Everyone. Everywhere. SCREAM until you know what God is completely enraptured me from the first page. As a very skeptical mystic, I find poetry about God to be challenging. But Liz Bajjalieh has written such a spacious series of poems about what God might be that I was left at the end wishing that there were more. I wanted more beautiful and rage-filled and hilarious images to fill my mind, replacing that one tired image of the divine that I’ve been working to forget, eager to fill that space with more wonderful mystery. My deepest thanks to Liz for these poems, many of which will occupy my imagination for the rest of my life.
Joann Renee Boswell, author of Meta-Verse!: it’s going to be interesting to see how yesterday goes
Each poem of Bajjalieh’s SCREAM until you know what God is offers readers wonderful worlds of all scales. From the smallest piece of stale fruit to the winding waterfront or a pair of passed down shoes, Bajjalieh’s worlds encapsulate a shifting and ever-changing view of God that divines the brilliances of everyday matters as their own complete entities. These poems cut as often as they heal. It is their unapologetic edges which adhere to the reader and leave their images in the mind long after reading.
Bajjalieh weaves rhythmic threads of object permanence and spatial abstractions into poetics which grab at the infinite in deeply impactful ways. The author embraces all the joy, pain, and deep confusion which accompany a search for God. Emotion is threaded into scenes of stillness and seeking, drifting and yelling, questing and answering. Each poem feels like an invitation to seek out that which we find divine in our own existences, challenging the very nature of what can be called godly.
Eliza Marley, author of You Shouldn’t Worry About the Frogs
Liz Bajjalieh
(she/they/he) is a Quaker(ish) poet and visual artist who lives on Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and Hocąk land, sometimes called Chicago. In May of 2024 they saw the smallest millipede they’d ever seen, so small it could fit on the tip of her fingernail with room to spare.