The Unexpected Joys of a Geriatric Debut

If I were 26 years old, full of piss and vinegar and had a debut poetry collection, I’d fancy myself a modern-day troubadour. I’d live out of my car, which would likely be a beat-up Volvo station wagon, with a COEXIST bumper sticker slapped across the back windshield. I’d inflict my poems on both suspecting and unsuspecting audiences, roaming from town to town, taking the stage at whatever coffee shops would have me. I’d wow the crowds that would number anywhere from two to twenty-two with my full-throttle performances, embodying the emotive arcs of my poems. My audience would laugh one instant, and then with the alchemical dark arts of my verbal prowess, they’d be volta’d into grief and ennui with breakneck speed. They couldn’t help but cry cathartically at the depths we plumbed together.

As it stands though, I’m 46 years old and married with two kids. If I’m full of piss, it’s probably a prostate issue, and if I’m full of vinegar, it’s likely apple cider vinegar for a muscle cramp or acid reflux.

When I first heard the phrase “geriatric pregnancy” a few years ago, I imagined white-haired women of grandmaternal age, osteo-arthritic shoulders hunched forward, feet shuffling, and pregnant bellies. But no, this is an actual phrase in the world of medicine, apparently used by obstetricians to inflict emotional harm on pregnant folks over the age of 35. Partly as a form of mockery of that unfortunate phrase and partly as a playful homage to the people it’s been wielded against, I’ve taken to calling my poetry collection, Holy the Body, my “geriatric debut.” The phrase has helped me enjoy the happiness I feel at my book’s publication, while mitigating the haunting sense that this is something I should have accomplished earlier in my life.

While I wrote poems in high school and college, it wasn’t until my time working on a Master of Divinity degree in seminary that I began to take poetry seriously. My first creative writing professor for poetry was the man-myth-legend himself, Pulitzer Prize winner, Yusef Komunyakaa, who taught at Princeton University when I was at Princeton Theological Seminary. I didn’t deserve to have such a professor, and he didn’t deserve to have to read the poems I turned in. The first time I met with Professor Komunyakaa during office hours, I foisted 12 poems on him. We sat in his office for two-and-a-half hours, slowly reading through and considering each line of each poem. At times, he tried not to grimace. I’d never had my poems critiqued before. Even though he was kind, he was unerringly meticulous, which made me feel as though I were being disemboweled. Holding my entrails in my hands, I looked up at him and asked, “Is there hope?” He grinned and responded, “There’s always hope.” In our second meeting, only two weeks after the first, I brought him a stash of 10 poems I’d just written. On seeing this cache of new work, Professor Komunyakaa said to me with a sly drawl and a good dose of side-eye, “My goodness, you’re prolific.” I realized immediately this was no compliment.

When I was in my late twenties, I spent several years working on and completing a PhD in contemporary poetry and creative writing at the University of St Andrews in Scotland under the mentorship of Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie, two more remarkable poets who didn’t deserve to have my early work inflicted upon them. They did read them though, as Don often playfully reminded me, because they were “contractually obliged” to do so. You’d think, as smart as I should have been, that I would have dialed in a strategy for publishing poems and working towards a collection. Your assumption of my competence, while gracious, would be terribly misguided.

Those years and into my early thirties, my strategy for publication was to send a few poems to The New Yorker and The Paris Review. If they didn’t accept any of the packet, which they have yet to do (though hope springs eternal), I’d wait another year or so to send them more. This proved not to be a solid strategy for achieving literary stardom. I realized, rather belatedly, that my modus operandi was fatally flawed.

Was it persistence I needed, or luck? Or perhaps I should try to discover kompromat on the editor of a large poetry press and blackmail them into publishing my collection? Surely that’s not the seediest way a book has come to be published?

Finally, around ten or eleven years ago, I started in earnest seeking publication for individual poems and for the collection itself. My manuscript, at the time called Lonesome Gospel, was chosen as one of four finalists for a contest at one of the first places I ever sent it to. “This seems easy,” I thought. That was in 2016. When my manuscript wasn’t chosen as the winner, I had a sinking feeling that getting a collection published might take longer than I hoped. And my goodness, did it ever.

With individual poems, I decided on a strategy of aiming for a higher number of rejections each year rather than acceptances, as you can almost guarantee rejection in this literary game. Some years, I hit 85-90 rejections and felt accomplished at the scale of my failure.

Rejection became a way of life for my poetry. “Sightings,” one of my favorite poems I’ve ever written, was rejected over 120 times by a variety of publications before it climbed out of the slush pile and was published by The Sun magazine. Having luck with individual poems helped me start sending out the collection more frequently.

Contest after contest after contest. Semi-finalist for this, Finalist for that. These steps are common in the world of American poetry. Variations on the collection were a Finalist for four different prizes and around the same number of times a Semi-finalist. I grew mildly despondent over the years at my prospects of ever having the manuscript become a published collection. Was it persistence I needed, or luck? Or perhaps I should try to discover kompromat on the editor of a large poetry press and blackmail them into publishing my collection? Surely that’s not the seediest way a book has come to be published?

Then, in 2024, I received an email that changed everything. Texas Review Press was interested in publishing my collection, and I didn’t even have to blackmail anyone. They just liked my work and wanted to publish it. Crazy idea! I was elated. I bought a nice bottle of Scotch to celebrate (Lagavulin 16, in case I can broker a Nick Offerman-style branding deal). My wife sighed in relief that there was now one less thing I couldn’t perseverate about. Then, of course, I found other things to perseverate about, like every single line in my book contract, certain that someone somewhere in this process was trying to cheat me out of all the riches that would surely come my way once my collection was published. My editor laughed when I raised concerns about movie rights in my contract.

Between signing the contract in 2024 and my book’s release in March 2026, I read up on marketing, how to make a nuisance of myself on social media to shift copies of the book. I planned launch parties, one back home in the Carolinas, one in Nashville, where I live now. I lined up other readings, begged publications to review the collection (some did, and the reviews have thus far been wonderful), worried about promoting the book with no real budget, and genuinely enjoyed the steps of bringing the collection into the world. All in all, launching the book has been an exhausting and lovely gift of an experience.

What about my age, though? Maybe I’m not so geriatric as I sometimes feel, but as I see much younger poets coming out with debuts, and I see the grey in my hair and the white in my beard, I do feel old to only have a debut collection. For years, uncertainty about my work was connected to uncertainty about myself. Who am I to call myself a poet? Who am I to suggest my work might be worth someone’s time and energy to read or for them to show up at some venue to hear me read?

For me, I imagine this comes from growing up poor. By the time I was five, I’d already eaten enough bologna to reconstitute a herd of pigs or of whatever animal bologna comes from. Beenie Weanies, pinto beans and cornbread. (Even when we were broke, I couldn’t stomach Vienna sausages though. That was a step too far.) Shoe stretch on my dress shoes to make them last longer, free lunch at school. Hearing Mom and Dad’s arguments over money. How could I grow up this way and somehow feel comfortable thinking that writing poems is a legitimate way to spend a life?

Something shifted in me in the last few years. It started before the book came out. I found myself more fully able to embrace the notion of making literature as a legitimate way to spend a life. I have been saved at times by other people’s poems and stories. Why then was it hard for me to believe that my words could have real and lasting value for a reader? To believe not just in the power of words or the importance of the arts but to believe that this was a legitimate pursuit for me, that I could take part in this way of life without feeling like an imposter, this has been a world-altering shift for me.

Realizing this has made having my book in the world all the much richer. Had I published my first collection earlier, I would have had imposter syndrome to wrestle with much more vigorously. Instead, I’m in a better place now to own the value of writing as a way of life and accept and celebrate that this is how I choose to spend a significant part of my days. I can write now without feeling like I have to constantly justify this choice for my life.

So, here I am, staring down fifty with my “geriatric debut.” Do I still wish I’d published a first collection sooner? Some days, sure. But mostly, I find myself simply grateful, knowing for certain that I wasn’t ready to share my work full throttle when I was younger. Despite the gray in my hair and the white in my beard, I now possess a different kind of vim and vigor than I did when I was closer to thirty. Sure, I don’t want to live out of a car, and when I travel for readings, I don’t want to be away from my family for more than a few days at a time, but this is my work and my life, my geriatric debut, and I love that I get to share my book with readers.

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Holy the Body by Donovan McAbee is available via TRP: The University Press of SHSU.