Jean Gallagher is also the author of This Minute. She lives in New York and teaches at Polytechnic University.

About Stubborn:

"Jean Gallagher majestically conducts a history of approaches to the sacred in Christian art, scripture, mysticism, theology. She rewrites the Bible as she re-sees the 'gravities, necessities, haphazard plots' behind the frozen sacramental moments of religious art. From Duccio to Giacometti, Thomas Aquinas to Catherine of Siena, Annunciation to Assumption, Stubborn revels in Gallagher's own 'stubborn love / for things as they seem.' In a sequence here based on a Duccio altarpiece a bewildered apostle experiences the resurrected Christ 'like a language / I don't know ... and there's never been an alphabet for it, ever.' Now—because of Jean Gallagher's splendid experiment—there is."
—Bruce Beasley

"In this intriguing and highly readable collection of poems what the poet called 'the stubborn mass of all big ideas' meets her 'stubborn love / for things as they seem.' Gallagher looks past the aesthetic dimensions of Medieval and Renaissance paintings—the subjects of the poems here—to the Biblical events they depict, and past those as well to their human meanings. She shows us how it feels for the human and the holy to interact."
—Mark Jarman