What We Do with God

In What We Do with God, Daniella Toosie-Watson collapses the divisions between humans, the natural world, and the divine, and between the intimacies of mercy and desire within ourselves.
Daniella Toosie-Watson's debut poetry collection, What We Do with God, meditates on the politics of mental health, pleasure, and the natural world. In this book, the everyday miracles of insects are studied, celebrated, and made sacrosanct. Prayer and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Social constructions of propriety have no bearing on sensual connection and exploration. As the speaker navigates these different worlds and their myriad questions--calling upon Puerto Rican, Iranian, and Russian inheritance to explore where, why, and how ancestral mysticism and Western pathology intersect and/or diverge--they find those questions mirrored back as they maneuver through the stark realities of the U.S. mental health care system.
Guided by curiosity, tenderness, stark clarity, and unapologetic impiety toward a binary of holiness and waywardness, What We Do with God invites readers to imagine a world where the "care" we choose to cultivate extends beyond the grace we give ourselves and those directly around us, but to the interconnecting ecosystems that hold the wider world together.

Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) is a poet, visual artist, and educator from New York. They have received fellowships and awards from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, VONA, the InsideOut Detroit Literary Arts Project, and the University of Michigan Hopwood Program. Daniella has been published in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. They were the profile writer for The Kennedy Center's Next 50 initiative and are currently a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute. Daniella received their MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program.