Trish Hopkinson explains the origin of her poetry.
Poets, and writers in general, write from their own lives, their own experiences. How we are shaped as individuals is reflected, consciously or unconsciously, in what we write. A Godless Ascends, the 2024 collection by Trish Hopkinson, kept punching that home in my head as I read.
Shew rites about her family, her childhood, and herself. She writes about her mother and her father. She says this about her father: “Truth is, / my dad’s book closed before he learned / to read, so he bult a burning house instead / & when a thief offered him gold, he didn’t fight or turn to run / but swallowed it whole, carried it like lead in his throat.” That may at first sound cruel or uncharitable, but it is precise, a daughter weighing what she finally understands.
She is just as precise when she writes about her mother: “Her mouth is home—acceptance despite / my disbelief, mostly, and host to her own / martyrdom. She named it that herself.” That precision continues; she applies it to herself as well.
Hopkinson frames the collection in a running theme of ascent. She’s moving from turmoil to resolution, if not relief. But you don’t yet see the resolution. As you read you sense the collection is building toward something. It may not be some grand understanding or profound revelation or fundamental disclosure, but you know something is coming.
And then, toward the end of the collection, I found something: this poem.
In a Room Made of Poetry
Think how loss pulls language from us until
it swallows everything,
like undiagnosed cancer,
the accumulated past—
less eye, less mouth, less heart.
We had, not much—
thin coffee, thin socks. Here you can
wait, with desire, with
roots exposed
for an open womb. That heart-balm
as hope. The raw
bent—a bowl of fruit
in a language I never knew…
without tails, crosses of t’s. The autonomous dot of a
blackness answers, There are only ifs.
She’s explaining where her poetry has come from. The entire collection seems to be moving toward this moment, this understanding of how loss and pain pull language from us until they’re consumed. It’s as if writing it down will explain where it comes from and why we do it. And it suggests that there are few if any final answers.
The collection includes illustrations (including the cover) by Nancy Smith, an award-winning artist and the author of Women Speak: Poetry, Portraits and Prose of the Feminine Experience.
Trish Hopkinson
A Godless Ascends is Hopkinson’s first full-length poetry collection. She previously published four chapbooks. Her poems have been published in such literary journals as Sugar House Review, Glass Poetry Press, The Penn Review, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Cultural Daily, and others. She is a a champion of poetry and literary arts, having co-founded Rock Canyon Poets and Provo Poetry, groups featuring the writing of regional poets. She also serves as a board member of the International Women’s Writing Guild. She lives in western Colorado.
A Godless Ascends is the story of a life, a life illuminated by poetry. It challenges, disturbs, explains, and defines, and a reader, even a male reader, can’t help but see some of this experience in the poems.
Photo by Rob Bixby, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: Tamara Madison and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” - August 6, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Trish Hopkinson and “A Godless Ascends” - August 4, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Sarah Dickinson Snyder and “To Eve” - July 16, 2026
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