Glassful of Prayer

A stunning debut collection, Anthony Ceballos' Glassful of Prayer, wrestles with questions of identity against the backdrop of loss, heritage, family ties, addiction, nature, and urban Minneapolis. Ceballos relentlessly delves into the experience of claiming and defining a self with vivid imagery of reflections and nature, and through dreamed or imagined dialogue with an alcoholic father he never knew: "I am not/my father's boy, I am not/his body, I am not nobody.." In another poem, his grandmother's spirit asks, "Who? Who do you want to be?" Ceballos connects these themes of negative and positive identity through a single thread prevalent throughout the collection, authenticity, leading us through a landscape of darkness and ash to a place of self-acceptance and love.

It is rare to open a book that makes you feel more alive. Anthony Ceballos uses language with passion and precision to conjure a world marked by tenderness. In his quest to resolve our common sorrows, and his own, Ceballos resists the temptations of oblivion with a fierce insistence on clarity and love.
- Louise Erdrich

Glassful of Prayer is a book made equally of fiery longing and cool defiance. There are elegies, sacrifices, nightmares, dreams, visions, and prayers for memory, recognition, and wholeness that are stitched with painstaking care, word by word. The protagonists speak exquisitely from hungry, holy places—where the eros of the body sometimes meets its propensity for violence, shocked by the sweet taste honey taste the petal delicate / between your teeth i am torn to god. Readers will fall in love with this restless, sensuous voice, a wise and aching chronicler of "broken hallelujahs."
- Sun Yung Shin

Alive with tangible longing, the poems in Glassful of Prayer make music of loss. Here, though Ceballos tethers the reader to “the scattered Kodak family” in this “end-time colonial settler nightmare,” he simultaneously claims the power of poetry to heal. The poet becomes “Geppetto building. . . with words and letters.” The moving poems in Glassful of Prayer remain haunted by a “father still / at the bottom of basement stairs,” and the speaker sees themselves as “the splintered bedlam” of reflection. Ceballos fills the pages with the hypnotic remembering of the poet’s body, and declares: “The poets lungs are a rebellion.” Yes. Listen to this poet’s “bel canto."
-Kimberly Blaeser

Anthony Ceballos is a poet who understands you need to get your hands dirty in order to both uproot and grow anew, and this stunning debut collection breaks earth. Here are buds and bloom shaped from family, from body, from Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue. These poems grow from a soul that's singing from the soil we share, and they will nurture you." 
- Bao Phi

In Glassful of Prayer, his debut book of poems, Anthony Ceballos weaves together stories of family and community, loss and love. From the first poem to the last, he offers prayers of blessing for his mother and grandmother, prayers for the loss of his absent father, poems in praise of the Minneapolis neighborhood where he grew up, and poems of praise and supplication to the earth. In Sing, he sings until he cannot sing any more. And in, Listen, the Earth, he says “this is the earth/her voice will guide us home.” Glassful of Prayer is a deeply moving collection of poems.
- Carolyn Holbrook