BOOK REVIEW

Jeremy Paden’s How to Recognize God’s Chosen and Waiting for Perec by Mario Meléndez, translated by Jeremy Paden

By Kirsten McAteer     July 9, 2026




How to Recognize God’s Chosen
Jeremy Paden
Accents Publishing (2025)
74 pp. $19 (paperback)

Waiting for Perec
Mario Meléndez, translated by Jeremy Paden
Action, Spectacle Press (2025)
24 pp. $17.95 (paperback)

In 2025, Jeremy Paden published both a new full-length collection of poetry, How to Recognize God’s Chosen, and a translation of Chilean poet Mario Meléndez’s Waiting for Perec. Reading the two together provided a deeper pleasure than I anticipated—a needed tonic given the pervasive darkness in the news.

Waiting for Perec is a darkly funny, absurdist collection in which writers, musicians, artists, fictional characters, God, and even rats dance onto the page, playing in the void while stalked at times by a very seductive death. In How to Recognize God’s Chosen, we move from creation to regeneration. Touching on the parable of the mustard seed, Paden offers a meditation on a non-binary beloved—a Christ figure—who emerges from humble, dispossessed origins to tenderize hearts that have been “too long in a city of merchants/sold to & bought by the lowest bidder,” until they can, “like a seed, like a cedar shoot,” be planted on the mountain, their seeds scattered to the winds. Will zhe/hir be recognized? Will we receive the message? Or pervert it?

In both collections, Paden employs the Levisian ampersand, visually looping and binding thoughts/ideas/clauses into closer relationship—perhaps as these two books are themselves bound in conversation.

The title Waiting for Perec pleases me, as neither Beckett’s Waiting for Godot nor Georges Perec appears in the poems. Why invoke them? Beckett’s characters wait for a salvation that never arrives. Perec, lover of puzzle and constraint (he famously wrote a novel without the letter e), invited readers to piece together fragmented realities. Constraint allowed him to evoke the nearly inexpressible—his mother was murdered in the Holocaust—the void, the unhealed absence.

We take the title as clue and then encounter the proem:

These visions were narrated by an urn maker
shortly before he died
a compulsive & avid reader
he left countless versions in notebooks & loose papers
We publish here some of his imagination’s troubling visions.

An urn maker creates vessels for the dead. Immediately thereafter, we read: “The unconscious is a madhouse/with an ocean view,” followed by “I saw a blank page/wandering through the fields/of unreality/It seemed like a ballerina/about to give birth.” Is not all art-making an attempt to claim godlike power—to create something from nothing before we return to dust? If imagination is oceanic and maddening, perhaps constraint is what gives it shape.

What follows is a long sequence of tight, numbered poems, most beginning with the incantatory “I saw.” The urn maker beholds a wild array of artists and figures: Whitman, Heraclitus, Sinatra, Little Red Riding Hood, and Botero’s fat women. The translations crackle with compressed, Anglo-Saxon energy. Death flirts everywhere. God is often dead—or death’s lover. Christ is searched for, but not found alive.

Creation feels dangerous here. Makers assume godlike powers in pursuit of immortality, risking madness and inflation, yet all ends in death—even God. Poem 24, about Picasso, exemplifies this tension:

24

I saw Picasso riding a green horse
wearing a straitjacket & an African mask
His women followed him (on foot) through a salt desert
carrying his paintings on their backs & an umbrella
belonging to Matisse
The horse flaunted a strange wig
its orthopedic hooves opened on every side
frustrating Picasso who hit it with a stick
made of ashes
Bored he dismounted the horse
& began to trace formless shapes on the ground
lines stolen from an impossible alphabet
Here I’ll dig God’s grave, he told himself
the worms won’t ever forgive me
& he commanded his women to slit their veins
while he painted his horse the color of eternity

Here the horse of Guernica, its splayed hooves, appears alongside African masks and the artist’s fraught relationships with women. In another poem, Sinatra, via time machine, witnesses the crucifixion, is begged to stay, but returns instead, “Signing all of his records he left/while the time machine/played the chords of My Way.” I am reminded of Nietzsche’s madman crying, “God is dead!” If so, the creators in this collection seize the burden of creation themselves—painting horses “the color of eternity.”

One of the strangest poems, number 37, lingers with me. Ten rats devour one another until the last “only had a left ear/Where its snout used to be was a hole/to the great beyond that could be made out from far away/It then stood as best it could/peed on the first cat that licked its wounds/& began to walk.” It calls to my mind how our society is devouring itself in electronic spaces—shouting, not listening, taking one another down. The final rat, left with only a left ear and a void for a mouth, begins only then to walk.

The collection ends with two right-justified lines:


I saw Eve’s picture
under God’s pillow


Eve appears only here. Is this a gesture toward another (possibly feminine) knowledge, another beginning?

From this void of absurdity and death, Paden’s own collection offers regeneration. In How to Recognize God’s Chosen, God is not dead but reborn as a non-binary beloved, emerging from the dispossessed: “the beloved is the homeless boy/who’s wandered down from a country/named Great River…” As in Perec, the poems are untitled but numbered (here in Roman numerals), and there is a tension, hinted at by the epigraph:

God is at home; we are in the far country.
—Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard

God is not dead, but among the discounted, the overlooked, the sneered at. “No journalist, no professor/of political science, no writer of policy or film-script/will notice zhe or those gathered below the cliff/around the fire/but they will thrive, thrive on their flowers/& stones, they will live & thrive & turn to dust/zhe & the congregation of god’s chosen.”

At times, Zhe doubts and/or resents being the chosen and pushes back:

xxviii.
sometimes god’s chosen decides, no longer
do I want to be god’s chosen, sometimes
zhe walks out on it all & asks: god,
who are you to choose whose are yours
sometimes zhe goes & sits under a willow,
beside a stream & says: no, my body
is temple to nothing & no one
& says: my body is stone, nothing else
& asks: what is soul to stone & what
is stone but earth baked hard & dry,
to which god, a hungry axolotl, says:
fine, you are soulless stone
& still my chosen gastrolith

Here, Zhe is the stone that aids digestion, and throughout, Zhe preaches of regeneration, resilience of bodies, of nature (“praise the resurrection plant & lichen”), questions over certainty, the need for comfort, and slaking thirst. The poems enact call and response between Zhe and “the faithful,” who codify, monetize, divide. “The faithful divide & divide/again/until division stands/as the only proof of their fidelity.”

Like Christ, Zhe is killed. Contemporary references to Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. are devastating:

none will know until after the pistol-whipped body
is taken down from the barbed wire fence
until after the body chained to the bumper of a truck
is dragged through city streets & left at the morgue
with no one to claim the corpse, with no one
to cry out:
here, here lies the very goodness of god

Yet, as with the mustard seed, something has been planted. An earlier poem insists it is not the fruit—achievement, production, acclaim—but roots that matter. The collection ends:

& when the gathered turn back to hir
to say, teach us the lesson of the flower

to ask, finally, is it prayer, is it gift
is it life, are we, too, flowers
they will turn & find only a goatsbeard
big & white & gone to seed

In his Note of Gratitude at the end of How to Recognize God’s Children, Paden, who teaches in Lexington, Kentucky, and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, states, “Where would any of us be without each other and this great town chock-a-block with writers and small kindnesses we imperfectly show each other?” Indeed. We can wrestle alone in the void, burying God in the desert in search of immortality. Or we may create something softer, more tenacious together—seeds blown on the wind, taking root even in parched soil.

​How to Recognize God's Chosen by Jeremy Paden

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​Waiting for Perec by Mario Meléndez, translated by Jeremy Paden

KIRSTEN MCATEER is a poet and essayist living in Portland, OR. She holds an MFA from New York University. Her poems have appeared in various journals and one was long-listed for Australian Book Review's Peter Porter Prize. She has written criticism for Tupelo Quarterly and Southern Humanities Review. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, she owns a group psychotherapy practice specializing in disorders of overcontrol and is drawn to the rewilding of inner and outer landscapes in both her therapeutic and poetic work.