​Words for Flying is available from FutureCycle Press (click book cover to order)

Click here to order on IndieBound​

"Why do the best of Chris Abbate’s poems make me cry? Could it be envy, because they’re so good they make me wish I’d written them? Could it be the sadness, vulnerability, and love mixed in with the playfulness of these poems? Or maybe their numinousness, which is also always somehow subtly part of the mix? Or is it simply that voice, finally, of “an ache of a boy,” its honesty, its accessibility, its tenderness, speaking a sort of “unspoken language of boys,” especially to those of us who most needed a voice like Abbate’s back in our own boyhoods, and still sorely need it today? It’s all these things. And it’s also because, as with any great music, beautiful singing can have that effect on us. And we wipe our eyes so that we may keep on reading."
 
~ Paul Hostovsky

Bookstores where Words for Flying is available

Bookmarks
634 W. Fourth St. Winston-Salem, NC

Malaprops Bookstore/Cafe
55 Haywood St. Asheville, NC

Quail Ridge Books
4209-100 Lassiter Mill Rd., Raleigh, NC

Scuppernong Books
304 S. Elm St., Greensboro, NC

So & So Books
704 N. Person St., Raleigh, NC
​
Wake County Libraries

​​​Talk About God is available from Main Street Rag (click book cover to order)

“God is the glue for connection and mystery in Chris Abbate’s Talk About God, a masterful debut collection. These poems are about his Catholic childhood, the yearning to break away from convention and the unyielding need for patterns to manage the unforgiving nature of life. Yet, most of all, these poems speak of the connections between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and friends and neighbors. Abbate explores the chaos of adolescence and many years later, reflects on the breakup of his parents’ over fifty-year marriage through the exacting lens of ritual and geometry with carefully nuanced images that earn every bit of their screen time. Every poem in Talk About God reminds you to feel gratitude for the beauty of the present moment and not to forget how you can create a joyous and meaningful life.”

~ Alice Osborn, author of Heroes without Capes

In Chris Abbate’s new collection, Talk About God, we find a depth of faith in everyday moments.  It is found in delivering newspapers in winter and in the comfort of platters of cavatelli.  Reading these artfully constructed poems, we are “waiting on gravity,” sitting on the edge of our seats for the next word – the next achingly beautiful image.  These poems sing with authenticity and grace.  We enter a world where, “God moves from the inside out.”
 
​~ Cristina M. R. Norcross, Editor, Blue Heron Review.  Author of Still Life Stories and Amnesia and Awakenings

Bookstores where Talk About God is available

Malaprops Bookstore/Cafe
55 Haywood St. Asheville, NC

Quail Ridge Books
4209-100 Lassiter Mill Rd. Raleigh, NC

River Bend Bookshop
2217 Main St. Glastonbury, CT

Scuppernong Books
304 S. Elm St., Greensboro, NC

So & So Books
704 N. Person St. Raleigh, NC
​
The Country Bookshop
140 NW Broad St. Southern Pines, NC

Wake County Libraries

Sample poems from Words for Flying

Canine Study #1: A River, Flowing

I’ve stopped asking the dog
about his day.
 
Instead, I ponder the moon
while he empties his bladder
over a crescent of periwinkle
around the mailbox.
 
I carry him inside each night
and hold him
to know what it is like
to feel everything.
 
Tomorrow, I will commit the original sin
of self-consciousness
and will crease the fine tablecloth
of a new day.
 
To me, eternity is like a car,
passing,
but to him, it is a river,
flowing.
 
No wonder his life is so short.
All that ecstasy,
I couldn’t stand to bear it.

God, Bowling 

When the thunderclap was a cosmic crash, when it shook
the foundation of the house until the vibration rippled upstairs
 
to the room my brother and I shared,
we called it a strike.
 
And when it sounded like a train that had passed,
a rumbling in the distance, the sky merely clearing its throat,
 
we admitted that even God sometimes threw a gutter ball.
The only picture of my grandfather I remember
 
is him in a suit and tie holding a bowling ball to his heart,
eyeing pins at the end of a lane.
 
His obituary from 1959 read, Giuseppe Stefano, Expert Duckpin Bowler;
not what my mother had told me about him –
 
farmer, immigrant, factory worker, gardener –
but rather, what I imagined him to be –
 
herder of storm clouds, gatherer of sky,
hands that make thunder.

Driving Range

Like monks in a scriptorium
leaning into their labor,
we are a perfect row of men,
each in his own hitting bay,
an oasis of concentration –
legs shoulder-width apart,
hands below the chin,
gripping the club gently
as if holding a bird.
 
Except for the occasional grunt,
feathered curse,
or sigh of disapproval,
we have taken a vow of silence.
 
We should have mastered it by now –
a simple rotation of the shoulders and hips,
a half-orbit around a white, dimpled sphere.
Each ball is a petition,
an agent of self-worth
we launch into this graveyard
of lofty expectations.
 
From a distance, one would wonder
what we are trying to prove –
a defiance of gravity,
a delaying of the inevitable descent to earth.
But we have our own definitions
of madness. Every swing closer
to the ten thousand required for mastery.
 
Hitting a golf ball should be easier than this,
easier than balancing a mortgage and marriage.
And sometimes it is,
like the times it feels effortless,
when the actor and action become one,
the way love feels at first,
the tiny moon of a man
rising above the tree line,
cresting into an arc of satisfaction,
a confluence of toil and desire
he points to and says,
Look. Look what I can do.

Other poems

New York Quarterly (August 2021)

• "Mother, Planting"

Toasted Cheese (June 2020)

• "Before You Were Here"
• "Drawing the Tree
• "Invisible Roots"
• "Day Care Report"
• "Stations of the Cross"

Chagrin River Review (Spring 2017)

• "Last Request"
• "Altar Boy"

Hamilton Stone Review (Spring 2017)

• "A Good Snowstorm"
• "A New Room"
• "January 29, 2012"
• "Omniscient Sea"
• "The Wolves of Them"

Timberline Review (Summer/Fall 2016)

• "To My Parents on Their Separation"
• "Two Bottles"

Sample poems​​ from Talk About God

To My Brother and Sisters

A girl and boy
meeting over a toboggan
after a February blizzard
launching their bodies
into a winter courtship
a fall wedding
a suburban ranch
with green shrubs
a white mailbox post
and inside
mixing their bodies together
like water and flour
to make you and you
and me
and then you
crawling
walking
earnest
determined
our adjectives
scattering
into glass rooms
miles from
the original hill
its inadvertent snow
still whisking
their diligent bodies
young and clamorous
their joyous winged bodies
pressed together
under teenage clothes
headlong into a blank canvas
her arms circling his waist
their eyes full ahead
their laughing mouths
a verb
like a toboggan
carving outlines of us
in the trail behind them

Paper Route 

When it snowed
the car would be warming in the driveway.
By the time I got outside
the newspapers for my route
had been stacked in expectant piles
in the backseat of Dad’s Oldsmobile.
He steered with one knee
while his ink-black fingers
lifted coffee to his lips.
He stopped every few houses
for me to deliver yesterday’s news
to my vigilant customers.
The orange beat of hazard lights
cut through snowy dawn,
heralding our arrival.
 
One morning the car got stuck,
the tires spinning a groove in the snow.
Before I could get out to push,
Dad handed me his half-empty mug,
popped the trunk
and retrieved a small shovel
and a bucket with sand.
From the side view mirror
I watched the crown of his head bob,
his shoulders hunch
into digging and tossing,
and the ephemeral ghosts of his labor;
the vapor he breathed
into an oncoming winter he despised.
 
After he had folded himself
again behind the wheel
and I had returned his coffee,
I asked why he got up to drive me.
He replied that he loved me,
then gently pressed the accelerator –
enough for the sand to do its work
and the tires against the sand
and our bodies over the tires –
plodding us along this daily route
in spite of winter.
Not up and away,
but out and back around,
always returning a little lighter
to the place we began.

Talk About God 

What was that talk about God before dinner,
those chants before eating, gazing into the chandelier?
Maybe it was our way of talking to each other,
a cotton language we filled with soft words,
the kind we imagined our parents spoke
between their pillows while we slept.
 
Why did Grandma hold Jesus on a cross
between her fingers while she watched soap operas?
Was it the same man she spoke to in the ceiling
after she had lost her keys, and shouted thanks to
when we heard them jingle in her pocketbook?
He hung at the head of our classroom
and we talked to him whenever we needed help too.
 
What were the word circuses we created at Mass,
the white tent and menagerie over our bowed heads
as if we needed forgiveness?
Afterwards, we would shed our penitent blazers
while the adults spoke through steam
over the rims of Styrofoam coffee cups.
Their words sounded like sugar.
 
What was the weight teachers dropped into our backpacks,
the stones of catechism we carried home in school uniforms?
We wore our house keys under crisp white Oxfords.
We let ourselves inside, but still looked both ways
before slipping a self-conscious hand into the cookie jar.
 
Why did they say God was keeping score?
Is that why Dad said he could never catch a break, like Job,
or why Mom said lying would turn my tongue black?
I would check in the mirror each morning
that it was still pink like I pictured the rest of my insides.
 
Why did we build ladders to the sky those Catholic years
or squeeze our eyes closed praying for water
when we held ten thousand years of rain?
Enough to sprout oceans,
enough to contain leviathans.