Plain Spoken: Poems to stop a flop in the reeking koi pond of Christian nationalism

Recent events in Minneapolis have demonstrated the by-now-obvious entrenchment of American Christianity in the nation’s fascist movement. Demonstrators at Cities Church were right to see David Easterwood — simultaneously a pastor at the church and the director of an ICE field office — as a potent symbol of fascist and evangelical lamination. 

Given the breadth and depth of Christian influence on American life, however, it would be unwise to simply cede the turf of public religiosity to its most debased claimants.

There exists a Christian left. An organizer of the Cities Church protest, Nemika Levy Armstrong, is part of it. “I am a reverend on top of being a lawyer and an activist, so I come here in the power of the almighty God,” Armstrong said to Don Lemon (who is Christian) during the protest. Reverend Angela Denker, a Minneapolis minister, has also written in support of the protest. 

Alex Mouw’s debut book of poems, The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey (Texas A&M University Press, 2026), is not a stridently political book. Because of and not despite this fact, it successfully intimates a vision of Midwestern Christianity that’s a stark alternative to the Mammon worship too often passing for piety.

The poems unfold across gentle moments, in domestic, ecological and outer space. In a late poem of jaunty homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins, “the stars seem extra lit up with gossip / about how gorgeous still water is.”

In an aubade (a poem on the theme of daybreak), Mouw is startled by the call of a mourning dove outside his apartment: “I swivel my head to blankness. / The sky is gray as distant lake water and the sound / has slipped in me like a fishing line.” The dove’s call “sounds” the lake of the sky and enters Mouw, who “swivels” his head in mimetic imitation of the dove, source of the aubade’s abode-sweeping Audubonic sonar.

Mouw cares about history. The poems often seek to link the particular and everyday to the grand and public. In a poem about zoos, Mouw writes: “I tried to organize // a coup in the butterfly house but all they / wanted to do was drift from lilac to milkweed.”

In a poem called “The Nineteenth Century,” the speaker’s focus sharply pivots from the “brightly colored French revolutions” and from the eventuality of Lenin’s Russia, to “my dog curled on his bed / in the corner, watching silently / as I write. He takes up so little space.” The juxtaposition underscores the dog’s unwitting fragility and vulnerability. One consequence of the increasing self-consciousness that Americans have about living inside of history is a restored access to this emotional register. We feel ourselves and our loved ones being impinged upon. Our social world is shaped by half-hidden forces to which we’re always potential prey. 

The book’s simultaneous attention to history and religion offers a mature view of tradition. This manifests in Mouw’s adaptations of the psalms (“Psalm 139 from a Downtown Window,” “Psalm 43 Driving Through the Heartland”).

Psalm 139, verse 8 reads, “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; / if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” Mouw’s adaptation begins: “If I flop in the reeking koi pond, / you are there.”

The cycle of sleep and wakefulness across all the days of one’s life, invoked in a psalm the speaker has internalized, leads the speaker to imagine a more slapstick instance of falling and rising. It’s a light example illustrating the way religious readers can live with their texts, be saturated by their traditions, without succumbing to nostalgic fantasies of escape from the present or sterile imitation of great works. Tradition is continuity with difference.

The present is tomorrow’s past. Sooner or later, we are going to enter a new historical phase and begin reconstructing our country again. When that happens, we will need to find a way to live with the people who are currently supporting ICE. This will require a significant amount of deprogramming. All hands will need to be on deck. There must be a cultural struggle to mitigate and one day reverse the ever-rightward lurch of the churches (a trajectory certainly long predating Trump).

In such a struggle, a book like Mouw’s works alongside the advocacy of someone like Nemika Levy Armstrong. While Armstrong brazenly confronts the pathologies of the existing culture, works like Mouw’s offer a more humane alternative to those pathologies — an alternative that has the potential to reach the people it needs to, because of its shared engagement with evangelical Christianity. Both approaches are necessary; they work in tandem. 

Mouw wrote a book of poems, not a political pamphlet. But if I observed a devout loved one of mine nearing a rightwing internet rabbit hole — saw them hopping nearer and nearer its precipice — then I would press this book into their hands, along with a pamphlet or two.