This Gift Card Has
Already Been Redeemed

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Mischa Willett
Paraclete Press · Fall 2026

A Poetry Collection

A luminous new collection from widely published essayist, translator, and critically acclaimed poet Mischa Willett, one of the most compelling voices in modern religious poetry. 

In his new collection, Mischa Willett negotiates with the vibrant voices of recent contemporaries, from Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, and Denise Levertov to W.M. Ransom, David Lee and Fleda Brown. The poems in This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed navigate faith, prayer, and church, but also disappointment, displacement, and deep reading. 

Both referential and reverent, this striking and deeply moving collection balances humor with the profound seriousness and abiding joy available at the heart of human life.

  • Mischa Willett is a man of many voices. Some poems land with explosive power, their density of praise and music much like that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Others are as loose and casual as the chat of your next-door neighbor. You, dear reader, are in for a ride. And you won't regret it

    Paul Willis

  • Willett offers us daring poems that are intellectually alert yet prayerfully devout, inviting us to inhabit a world where art and devotion, sea and soul, are in perpetual dialogue with one another.

    Karen An-hwei Lee

  • Mischa Willett’s newest collection celebrates the exuberance of language and literary wit. From wryly interrogating the quirks of daily life, work, and love, to honoring the styles of a range of other voices, Willett writes in a way that invites us to “feel God’s pleasure” in the poetic imagination.

    Tania Runyan

Preorder the collection

Paraclete Press · Amazon · Bookshop.org

Sample Poems

  • It’s faith that’s easy: praying, reading, fasting, loving, feasting are hard.

    It’s faith that falls like fog around us, everywhere softening the edges, filling our bodies with the cool, wet, web of existence and extra-sensory presence that is.

    It’s faith, not ethics, that stretches the ankle strap of a sandal, opens the hand to offer a benediction, coaxes the dough to rise.

    And it’s faith, just faith, that makes you stand straight in a city that hunches along its river, its concrete spine, because the column of air that supports you is a gift and an orientation, a heaven inside.

    It isn’t doubt when suffering seizes the hilltop of your heart or when the fireplace of ashes misses the heat that made it—when in the traffic you simply can’t hear a thing or the way is unclear—none of that is doubt.

    It’s faith, when you come to it, that asks of us everything, that empties and empties until we are full, that fills the gnaw in the gut, dispels the cloud of mind, that runs out the money-changers in the forecourt, that names.

    It’s faith, not duty, that takes the self off the altar of worship, leaving both open to occupation.

  • It wouldn’t even matter if I could sleep
    as in was capable
    since soon as I tuck in
    my son calls from his bad
    dream and I’m upstairs wiping his brow
    and saying how it’s okay
    so I trudge back down and arrange
    the pillow just right and my breath steadies
    till my daughter coughs and needs water
    downstairs to get it creak back up and I tell
    her it’s okay and I flop downstairs again
    and find my bed after and in it the baby
    upset by all this walking and creaking
    and I hear her and I pat her on the back
    and make wave sounds with my mouth
    telling her she’s okay and I don’t know if
    I am really I’m tired but I also feel guilty
    like I’ve won something huge, opulent
    and undeserved.

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