Steve McDonald’s CREDO is an accomplished, thoughtful, and infinitely engaging book.  The beautifully crafted poems of this, McDonald’s second full-length collection, take us many places:  correctional facilities, Catholic churches, Jeffers’s Hawk Tower, and Costco, but above all remain deeply rooted in soil, like the poems of Seamus Heaney.  Each of the twelve sections of the book—the twelve “steps”—moves between the conviction that all life is transitory and the equally strong conviction that there is “immortality,” or as McDonald defines it, a “once more, one more breath.”  Intelligent, honest, straightforward, these poems are a joy to spend time with.  Each one reaffirms the faith that poetry matters. 

      —Gail Wronsky, author of IMPERFECT PASTORALS

CREDO is an intimate and beautiful collection drawn from one man’s life. But it goes far beyond that to show us the commonality of our lives, rooted in rich physicality, growing in failure and humility and the heart breaking open. Through vivid language and well-chosen images, these poems bring us closer together. In the opening poem, “Step 1,” Steve McDonald writes about reading a child’s storybook to inmates at a women’s prison, and we too become those listeners, gathered round, “wide-open eyes of lifers / brimming at the well of story.”

                                    —Ellen Bass, author of LIKE A BEGGAR

These are the poems of idea and story, dense with the images of daily life, its tattoos and churches, its children and rain. They follow the pattern of a man’s recovery, his laughter and grief, his landscape and hope, his nostalgia and his desire.

                                    —Joseph Millar, author of KINGDOM