Via Dolorosa and Advent Wreath by E.D. Watson

Imagine a pilgrimage in which the person on it admits at the beginning that she is no longer sure she believes in God. Imagine a pilgrimage that is littered with as much doubt as it is certitude. Imagine a pilgrimage that does not culminate in spiritual enlightenment but instead violently and irrevocably decenters the speaker, allowing for the most necessary of corporeal experiences (ironically, à la Jesus’s kenosis) and profound embodiment. That pilgrimage is E.D. Watson’s chapbook, Via Dolorosa and Advent Wreath (2024), winner of the previous year’s Cow Creek Chapbook Prize.

Organized by the order of the Stations of the Cross, the first section of Watson’s chapbook (“Via Dolorosa”) invites the reader into (or, rather, confronts the reader with) seemingly paradoxical realities of the Holy Land: a tour guide warning of local pickpockets along the way to the religious sites, half-burnt cars / behind fences strung with warning signs near sites publicly and commonly identified with spiritual transformation and understanding, and armed soldiers boarding the bus on which the speaker and the rest of the pilgrimage tour are riding.

Looked at through the lens of the cruel and gritty reality of crucifixion, however, such pairings work less as dichotomies and more as complementarities. Though now celebrated as the ultimate act of atonement, Jesus’s sacrifice was hardly experienced as such by his apostles (all of whom deserted him, fearing for their own lives) and the women who wept for him at the cross, watching him die a shameful and agonizing death. Undoubtedly, it is with this same knowledge and through this same lens that the speaker of the poem, “V. Simon the Cyrene,” admits, On all sides I am jostled / by witnesses of an execution. / They say the man had a knife / and the guards shot him down. Drawing poetic (if sobering) parallels between the Nazarene and the dead man (both killed by the state), Watson experiences painful realities that probably more closely resemble those of marginalized communities in first-century Jerusalem than the canonical Gospels portray:

What I’ll remember is the filth
of millennia. Passages slick
with the rot and shit of generations,
seething with skinny cats.

Though tragedy and suffering do abound in Via Dolorosa and Advent Wreath, moments of compassion and insight also exist. In fact, because of the harsh realities Watson encounters and which threaten to overwhelm her, such fleeting moments become for both the author and the reader all the more pronounced, all the more necessary. For example, in the final quatrain of “VI. Woman with the Issue,” the speaker, unbeliever in all but name by that point, observes:

At the Western Wall, the women
raise a song for their lost. They rock
and pray. I want to join but don’t belong.
Then a sister steps aside, makes space.

I want to join but don’t belong. Then a sister steps aside, makes space.

Similarly moved, the speaker of “Joy,” though (for all intents and purposes) still an unbeliever, entertains the idea of transcendent hope amid tragedy and suffering:

All this I see in these pruned trees:
meaning inside of the dead wood.
For God wastes not a single thing
but makes of ruin something good.

If you’re seeking a journey on which to embark to spiritually transform yourself or attain enlightenment, look elsewhere. As much as E.D. Watson’s Via Dolorosa and Advent Wreath begins with a single person and her attempt to retrieve spiritual goods that were sadly lost to her, it culminates in community. It is as much about loss as it is about truth. It is much about witnessing as it is about experiencing. Though it may not always be a joy to read, it is privilege to do so. A timely and necessary pilgrimage. An ultimate act of faith.

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Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025. Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, TX.