Bruised Gospel 's raw devotional sonority multiplies like a spell through poems of great formal range and restraint. "Alcaide-Escue bridges the tender and the terrible, exploring and examining the sadnesses and slow glories that bind us together. Like Louise Glück's work, these delicate yet deliberate poems transform image into meaning, recording the moment of realization and leaving the reader more fully alive." (Emma Bolden) "This is the poetry of pressure, uncontainable lyrics so tightly constructed they explode through a world injured and marked by its injuries, but healing and filled with the most wondrous light." -- Jay Hopler "Alcaide-Escue bridges the tender and the terrible, exploring and examining the sadnesses and slow glories that bind us together. Like Louise Glück's work, these delicate yet deliberate poems transform image into meaning, recording the moment of realization and leaving the reader more fully alive." -- Emma Bolden " Bruised Gospel takes notes from Sylvia Plath, weaving baskets out of broken thatch, making a toy out of a misshapen chair, reclaiming identity through deconstruction. Alcaide-Escue writes the image at the edge: of birth and death, plain and forest, water and shore. Like stardust in the alpine dew, Bruised Gospel proclaims the reworking of potential into energy, picking up dead lines and branches to weave a wreath, a collage, a photograph, a poem."-- Robert Eric Shoemaker "Through permutations of the elements into language, the generation of sentience submerged into matter, and the alchemy of decay, the incantatory lyrics of Bruised Gospel find "rebirth through refuge," taking up "again this body / occupied by many mouths," becoming "glass shattered," or dissolving, however transiently, 'into this tilted hour.'"-- Jonathan Simkins "If, in this unfolding new year, I can find the faith to pray again, it will be a bruised prayer, and if I find the voice to share the good news, it will be a bruised gospel. Sarah Alcaide-Escue's poems are a flame on the tongue, a hymn to unity." -- J'Lyn Chapman