How to Recognize God's Chosen

Poetry August 2025 ISBN 978-1-961127-18-0 74 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

how to recognize god's chosen is a collection of poetic fragments that make up a long poem loosely structured like a gospel account. The principal character of the lyrical narrative is referred to with the non-gendered pronouns zhe/hir, or at times as god's chosen or at others as the beloved. Pulling from a variety of religious and sacred texts—the Prophets, the Gospels, the Desert Fathers, Medieval mystics, the Upanishads, Sufi poets, and others—and the scholarly, textual debates surrounding manuscript culture, how to recognize god's chosen imagines a search for the divine set our contemporary moment of refugee crises, climate catastrophe, political populism, and the various forms of violence that make up life in the 21st century.

faith

From the Book

xiv.

the faithful sniff about for evidence of being chosen

the faithful divide & divide
again until division stands
as the only proof of their fidelity

this is not that
some faithful proclaim
& they pare the stories down
with pumice stones & scissors

all those repetitions
all the bothersome differences
in all those repetitions

smoothed over, cut out so the dead can bury the living

& a third school
& a fourth
arise & preach

winnowing forks & wind & little else

this is a test
they preach
god tests all those
who are chosen

What Others Say

how to recognize god's chosen offers a nongendered seeker's haunting search for and encounter with nongendered divinity. In these tender, lyrical, and profound poems, Paden takes readers on a timeless journey describing the commonplace fate of saints and deities: despised in the flesh, honored in the abstract. As in the best biblical and mythological narratives, one finds here beauty in sacrifice.

— Fenton Johnson , author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

Sometimes in periods of crisis, the theological underpinnings of our collective spiritual practices should be re-examined, their relevance renewed, and Jeremy Paden's how to recognize god's chosen is a powerful such opportunity. In our contemporary moment of populism, wealth disparity, climate insecurity, how to recognize god's chosen celebrates the commonplace and unusual ways we reach out to one another—the silbo gomero and kulning. It reminds us of the miraculous creatures of the natural world, such as the lungfish, the hellbender, the resurrection plant.

— Marcela Sulak , author of The Fault and City of Skypapers

The new collection by Jeremy Paden is a chance to luxuriate—in language, in profound thought, and in imagery so rich it rises up from the page. how to recognize god's chosen is a deeply moving and wholly original collection of beautifully crafted poems that will challenge readers in all the best ways.

— Silas House , Kentucky Poet Laureate, author of Lark Ascending

Jeremy Paden's extraordinary long poem in linked sections, how to recognize god's chosen, wrestles with faith and love in a mind-blowingly original way. The intensity and clarity of the language, its lyricism and its strangeness—not unlike the lush language of Berryman's Dream Songs, or the chiseled language of H.D.—lead the reader into those mysteries that lie beyond language itself, and leave us there to dwell in the brutal and beautiful magic of the world. I can't say how radical this work is, how gorgeous.

— Cecilia Woloch , author of Carpathia and Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gall

About the Author

Jeremy Paden

Jeremy Paden was born in Milan, Italy (1974) and is professor of Latin American literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and on faculty at Spalding University's low-residency MFA. He is also a poet and a translator. He is the author of multiple chapbooks and full-length collections of poems in both English and Spanish. His first book of poems, Broken Tulips, was a chapbook published by Accents Publishing in 2013. These are: ruina montium (Broadstone Books, 2016), prison recipes (Broadside Books, 2018), ruina montium (Valparaíso ediciones, 2018), world as sacred burning heart (3: A Taos Press, 2021), Un poema rápido en vez de un himno (Santa Rabia Poetry, 2024), Imágenes del mundo flotante (Alcorce Ediciones, 2024). Also, his bilingual Self-Portrait as an Iguana (Valparaíso USA, 2021) was named co-winner of the inaugural Poeta en Nueva York Prize. And, his bilingual and illustrated children's book Under the Ocelot Sun/Bajo el sol del ocelote (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2020), on the migrant caravan crisis, won a 2020 Campoy-Ada Prize awarded by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language for Children's Literature in Spanish. As a translator, he has published translations of contemporary Argentine, Bolivian, Chilean, Colombian, Mexican, Panamanian, Peruvian, Spanish, and Uruguayan poetry. His Spanish language translation of Ada Limón's The Hurting Kind has recently been published in Spain with Valparaíso Ediciones.