Anthony Oliveira

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2024 DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS • One of Indigo's Top 10 Literary Fiction Books of 2024 and Top 100 Books of 2024 • One of CBC's Best Canadian Fiction of 2024 A singular, stunning debut that transcends and transfigures genre—at once a bold retelling of biblical tales and an unforgettable contemporary coming-of-age story, connected in collapsing time across millennia. There are few love stories in the holy books. Love is what ruins. Love is what costs. Love is a flaming sword at our backs, a garden left to ruin and to wild. In Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira brings to vibrant, glorious life the gospel according to the disciple Christ loved—his companion in the days before the crucifixion, the only instrument that remembers with fidelity his sound. Sacred, profane, and rich with explicit desire and a poetic attention to form, Dayspring weaves electric and heart-wrenching stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that re-examines and re-frames great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life. Seamlessly blending fiction, memoir, and verse in the exhilarating tradition of Anne Carson and Madeline Miller, Dayspring is an immersive, mesmerizing work, one that wrenches beauty from cataclysm and finds bliss in apocalypse.

Dayspring

we speak these stories these stories speak us over and over until i am not sure if we are anything but history indulging a bad habit

writing does not heal. the document does not make whole. poesis is not a therapy it is thrusting a filthy digit into the spot where the lance has pierced you

and i wonder what i might have found the courage to become if not for all the scar tissue inhibiting my limbs

the sun came hurtling suddenly over the glass of the sea saying again to the day

Dayspring quotes

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