WHAT WE DO WITH GOD by Daniella Toosie-Watson reviewed by Elena Bowman • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Daniella Toosie-Watson, reviewed by Elena Bowman
DEITY ISSUES: DANIELLA TOOSIE-WATSON AND WHAT WE DO WITH GOD (Haymarket Books)

My Dead Dad knows how to take a joke. Knock, knock.

I first saw this poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson in The Rumpus last year, blazoned with the epic header: “In This Poem, My White, Jesus-Loving Dad with Glasses and Bad Jokes is Undead.” It’s rare for so much granular detail to line up in an instant, birthed by the universe itself to entice me. I’m a card-carrying member of the Religious Dead Dad Club, and like many many of us, I have a bone to pick with my dad, and with the God he left behind.

I didn’t say God isn’t real.
It’s that I can’t get a read on him.

In spite of the metaphysical title (ferociously and judiciously earned), the debut collection of memoiric poems What We Do with God reads like the meanderings of a curious intellect held aloft on the shoulders of previous playmates: the Psalms, Ovid. bell hooks. Dr. Seuss. Amy Winehouse. Gene Kelly. Kafka. In its thirty-five poems, the author luxuriates in their own queer and disabled body (“A Series of Small Miracles”), in the daily rhythms of lemonade and breastfeeding and birdwatching and cooking sofrito and communing with the ghosts of undead fathers. They dedicate the book to their childhood name, Gabby, allowing themselves to make immortal the words that a younger self couldn’t yet verbalize.

like God
were a messy child
eating ice cream.
(“On Flashbacks”)

Having won over my cummings-besotted heart, the book pivots deftly to heavier themes,. At only sixty-four pages, this work is a theology in color, a kaleidoscope of family convictions embodied by the White Christian Father™️ and the Puerto Rican mother, who embraced and encouraged the acknowledgement of apparitions as gifts of matrilineal legacy. Toosie-Watson explains and defends neither, instead asking us to consider them as reluctant roommates.

Alive dad
would be pissed if he knew my mom saw his Dead Dad ghost
in our living room.
(“In This Poem”)

These visions are synonymous with their mother, the vital, belly-dancing muse bedecked by coin scarves and attended by the spirits (and a doting pet Doberman). Her apparitions have been dismissed by psychiatrists as evidence of disorder, but the author writes for BrooklynPoets that memoir is disinterested in “causalities of illness, spiritual gifting, or both”; instead, Toosie-Watson’s work is animated by the ways in which diasporic traditions and Western institutions diverge and coalesce—especially around grief.

I read this book in the days and weeks leading to the twenty-fourth anniversary of my own father’s death, and my theology continues to writhe under the pressure of competing loyalties. There is always a catch built in. It seems to me that death is frequently how we learn the living, the residue of loss casting survivors in sharp relief. Grieving is an act of archeology, after all, and this is precisely what the poet has attained. In previous publications (ex: “Dad Says Being Gay is Like Kissing Your Mother, then Prays,” from VQR), the author confronts the legacy of absence, the nucleic friction that caught my eye a year ago. Grief is, of course, the desire to preserve—and to discover what preservation means. This is, predictably, a project of haunting and paternity where the Father is Alive and Dead and also Jesus; it’s also a book of vulnerability and agile self-articulation.

How to render it, you know what I mean:
the unspeakable thing.
(“The Obsession to Be Good”)

What We Do with God is a masterful reflection in which dance is no less than divine communion and psychosis raises a guardian angel in the guise of Horton the Elephant. God is alternatively: cavity-plagued; drunk; a Doberman. God is Marilyn Monroe. Jesus drinking in the discoteca. God is a failed salsero. ¡Wepa! My only lament is that the collection does include Toosie-Watson’s “Jesufrito,” a heady portmanteau of eucharist, purity culture, and their mother’s recipes (you can find it at Frontier Poetry). It’s delicious and funny in the best ways, eagerly reflective of knotted family mysticisms. I’ll forgive them for this omission, but urge you to find it for yourself. Instead, I’ll redirect to “Sometimes I Dream of the Children I Don’t Have and Miss Them in the Morning” and this moment of previous incarnations in which the poet coyly lets slip the double-entendred premise of the project:

I open the window’s
mouth and shout, Shut the fuck up—God
is talking.

A graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Toosie-Watson went on to receive their MFA from the University of Michigan and was shortlisted for the 2024 Oxford prize. These days, they’re a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute. What We Do with God was published by Haymarket Books on September 9th.

Elena Bowman is a writer and teacher in NYC. She was recently named a semi-finalist for the American Literary Review Nonfiction Contest and a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award. Some of her other work can be found at the Comstock Review, Anthrow Circus, William & Mary, and Cosmopolitan. An essay on C.S Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, and theological legacy is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins in 2026.