Apocalyptic writing has always wrestled with the same question that drives poetry: what can language reveal when the world seems on the verge of collapse? In her Tupelo Press collection from 2024, “The Right Hand,” Christina Pugh transforms that ancient tension into an inquiry, both of spirit and of body.
Her poems inherit the intensity of “The Book of Revelation” yet move through the material world: needles, basil leaves, marble, skin, with an alert and visionary calm. Apocalypse, in her poetry, becomes an opening, rather than an ending.
Reading Pugh, I kept returning to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s idea that “to read poetry is essentially to daydream.” The daydream, he says, joins reality and imagination into one deep current. In “The Right Hand,” that current runs through each poem, seemingly breathing the ache of revelation into ordinary matter. “Consent is a power. To yield is a power. I might even say: to yearn is a power,” Pugh writes, her syntax moving like prayer, widening the space between submission and strength until they become indistinguishable.
A single basil leaf in a kitchen, a glint of acupuncture needle, a memory of St. Teresa pierced by a golden spear. I think these images trace what could be called a theology of touch. Pugh shows how divine attention hides in what we handle every day. The poems read as if Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” had suddenly begun to speak, stone warming into flesh, telling us that pain and radiance arrive through the same aperture. The poet’s task, she suggests, is to translate/mute this wound. This sense of embodiment links her to the long apocalyptic tradition.
In these poems, the apocalypse is certainly not cosmic spectacle; instead, intimate attention. Pugh’s speaker listens to the smallest disruptions: “a mole of pain, an arcane unit of measurement,” and finds therein the pulse of the world’s unraveling. The end times arrive through acupuncture, through the brief flash when body and world trade places. Pugh asks, implicitly, what happens when revelation no longer descends from heaven but rises from the skin.
The result is a book that reads like a contemporary prayer manual for the Anthropocene, where revelation thundered with trumpets and beasts, “The Right Hand” hums with quiet persistence. Its disasters are internal, its resurrections local.
Each poem within the collection’s two long parts — “Into the Skin” and “L’incontro: The Meeting” — bears witness to what survives catastrophe: tenderness, sensory awareness and the willingness to stay porous, wherein the ecological and the mystical merge. A breath of air, once a symbol of spirit, now also carries the toxins of industry; yet Pugh treats that mixture as the site of our shared responsibility. The apocalypse, she implies, has already happened: we are living in its aftermath, charged with learning how to feel again.
Pugh’s poems cut through the crust of intellect to reach sensation. They enact a reversal of Cartesian logic: not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I feel, therefore I believe.”
“The skin, not the mind, creates the soul,” she writes, a line that could stand as the collection’s credo. Pugh shows that devotion and resistance share the same nerve. Her “yielding” is an act of radical openness: the refusal to harden even when the world burns.
Apocalypse, for Pugh, is revelation in motion: the moment the old order collapses and something merciful flickers underneath. Her poems testify that endings are always beginnings disguised.
With the line, “Pierced by rained gold,” Pugh turns pain into illumination. In that transformation lies Pugh’s art’s quiet audacity. She reminds readers that the divine still enters through the smallest breaches: a pinprick, a leaf, a word.
The reader leaves “The Right Hand” less with dread, and more with a strange steadiness. We recognize that collapse is our shared condition, but also that her sparse language: precision and grace, can make that knowledge bearable. Pugh inhabits exactly that halfway space, turning apocalypse into attention, and attention into a praise of Baroque art.
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Nicholas Skaldetvind is a freelance reporter with the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on X @dailylobo
