PUBLICATION DATE: November 13, 2026
"Here, in poem after poem, we discover an enchanted world, often filthy and worn, but still containing God's grace within it, like Christ smashed and beaten, but radiating his love through it all with his incredible beauty and strength. Call these memories in a world of contradictions what memories can offer us if we but let them: a feast, a banquet, with the finest wines and freshest breads there for the taking.
Billy knows how to pluck out as on a violin his witty jazz riffs on the Psalms. And the notes of those Psalms are everywhere to be tested and tasted, with their healing powers as they reveal the everyday-trees, clouds, flowers, farm animals, rusted cars-with the inscapes of their abundant grace. Billy plays fifty different tunes, using lines as short as one syllable to lines that roll on and on in wave after wave, the laughter and joy (and pain) unfolding again and again and again."
- from the foreword by Paul Mariani, poet and professor of English emeritus at Boston College and author of twenty books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens.
"I became lost in As it Is immediately, enveloped by poems as holy and earthy as the feet of Christ. In celebrating a range of people’s beauty and peculiarities with a vividness that can only flow from a heart of agape love, Chritchley-Menor delivers a taste of heaven into the hands of his readers. Like his 'Jana the Barber,' whose life is a 'masterclass/in hospitality to all that is human,' this collection will leave you awakened by wonder and grace.—Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place
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BILLY CRITCHLEY-MENOR, SJ is a Jesuit studying at Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry. As It Is is his first collection of poetry. You can find his writing on his Substack, From Every Side.