This Gift Card Has

Already Been Redeemed

Poems of Unexpected Graces.

The poems in This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed explore the territories of grace—where divine abundance collides with human disappointment. With wit, precision, and long devotion, Mischa Willett navigates the tensions of prayer, church, longing, and the peculiar comedy of living as a gift that someone else has loaded with payment.

These poems move between the sacred and the literary with theological depth and emotional honesty: from the irony of redeemed (and unredeemed) promises to ordinary wonders of art, sea, and soul. Willett’s language is both intellectually rigorous and prayerfully attentive, offering readers a collection that is at once daring, tender, and bright.

Blending the metaphysical wit of John Donne with the painterly devotion of contemporary masters, this book speaks directly to those living in the already-and-not-yet—where grace has been given, while we work to learn how to receive it.

Perfect for readers who appreciate:

Contemporary poetry that wrestles honestly with Christian faith and doubt
Sophisticated verse that is intellectually sharp yet spiritually resonant
Themes of grace, disappointment, prayer, and the humor of redemption
Literary craftsmanship rooted in the Christian tradition

Pre-order

Sample Poem

What people are saying.

Paul J. Willis

“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.”
Karen An-hwei Lee

“Mischa Willett’s radiant poetry collection moves with the quiet devotions of a life steeped in “praying, reading, fasting, loving, feasting,” where the disciplines of faith open into luminous encounters with the divine. There are echoes of W. S. Merwin in the music of Willett’s nature rhythms, at once contemplative and open to wonder. This collection is alive to Spirit and element alike, simultaneously attentive to the invisible and the tangible realms of human experience. At moments, the poems turn almost painterly, recalling Botticelli’s suspended sea—where beauty is both arrested and in motion, veiled yet revealed. 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.”
Tania Runyan

“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.”

Sample Poem from This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed

After Bells, After Drums

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.