Trish Hopkinson is an atheist. A reader might therefore expect A Godless Ascends to be, well, godless. Not at all. In the very first poem, “She-God // A Godless Celebrates Vernal Equinox,” we meet a spirituality of complete self-acceptance:

there are no confessions
by these hips

no repentance for these breasts


This spirituality supports the speaker as she journeys out of a hard home. In “Ascent” she writes:

I leave the blood nest; ancestry does not warrant,
association does not bind, me to breast

or covert—sparrows tumble from my throat,
let loose, flutter around the room,

peck the floorboards for seeds, flick their beaks
and bony tongues at gnats swarming


There is a great formality and authority in the tone. There is no hedging; the speaker literally says they are not bound to the covert: no more hiding. Whatever the sparrows mean to her—forgiveness? that whatever happened was God’s will?—she is done with them as well. After a struggle, this speaker knows who they are, what they need, and what they don’t need.
On the psychic distances from neutral to intimate, she sets many poems in the middle. In “Southside,” a bad boy is reduced to his appearance: “a mullet on a bullet bike.” By using this technique, whatever happens is just far enough away to not destroy the speaker or the reader.
I appreciate the breadth of experience this book covers, the nuanced viewpoints. A hard world has been brought to us and a way to cope with that world.