When I first heard of T.S. Poetry Press, I assumed that the T.S. was drawn from Eliot fame. But a visit to their website corrected my impression.

Behind the Press’s founding was a game started by some inventive poets called “tweetspeak.” It’s a “Twitter poetry party,” a one-hour bash where everyone tweets a 140-character poem with the hashtag #tspoetry. A prompt is provided by @tspoetry. “You write a few lines of poetry in response to the prompt and then play off the other participants’ lines,” the rules say.

So the TSP folks are poets who love fun. (So much for the T.S. Eliot connection. For all the undisputed mastery of Eliot’s poetry, “fun” is a quality I wouldn’t associate with it.)

What the TSP poets do have in common with Eliot is a spiritual bent. I can see their combo of fun and spirituality in one of the Press’s recent publications, Barbies at Communion & Other Poems, by Marcus Goodyear.

Goodyear writes a poetry column for Books & Culture and also edits the online magazine The High Calling, whose subtitle is “everyday conversations about work, life, and God.”

The volume’s title poem, “Barbies at Communion,” sets the tone. The poem’s scene is a communion experience at an unnamed Protestant church. I can tell that it’s Protestant because the communion crackers and grape juice are passed along the pews, as in my neighborhood Methodist church.

During this solemn rite, the poet’s daughter is quietly undressing her Barbie dolls: Ariel Barbie, Tinker Bell Barbie, and Sleeping Beauty. And what grabs the poet’s attention (and ours, as he presents it) is a surprising connection between the two rituals. Here are the poem’s final lines:

I don’t know why Ariel’s butt crack
makes me nervous: shining up at me
as I break a corner of cracker, Christ’s
flesh passing over naked dolls,
breasts without nipples
like an Eve before shame.

The play of “crack” and “cracker” is a brilliant delight: what a way to discover a link between these two apparently unrelated realms: Barbie dolls and communion. The crack/cracker play on words is, well, a “cracker” — in that old sense of a joke that “cracks you up.”

Having found the connection, Goodyear doesn’t leave it there, but goes on to reflect on how “Christ’s / flesh” might itself be related to this naked doll. Goodyear finds the connection in a prelapsarian innocence, a nakedness “before shame.”

Reflecting on the poet’s reflection—as a good poem always leads me to do—I ponder the mysterious mix of innocence and sexuality in all our bodies. This daughter playing with her dolls is the product of her parents’ sexual attraction, created in the very flesh that Christ took on.

And speaking of our flesh, Goodyear has several poems that discover its holiness in the most unexpected of circumstances. “Prayer Partners,” from its title and opening words (“I need prayer, absolution, all that”) sounds a serious note, which Goodyear then undercuts by continuing “but / I also need a bathroom. So I pee / in the stall next to an artist whose oils I saw last night.” As the poet tries to engage his prayer/pee partner in conversation, “He doesn’t respond but we hear / each other’s water.”

I must say that I haven’t before come across pee as an image for our human connectedness. But why not?

The poet is peeing in another poem as well: “Easter.” This time he’s in the church’s room designated for brides to change their clothes. There’s a shower there, on the floor of which the poet discovers a small Sytrofoam Jesus who “waits in that back room for someone / like me to notice while standing to pee / Jesus Christ! in the shower.”

In Goodyear’s incarnational vision, Jesus’ own body can surprise us in our own most bodily of experiences.

And flesh abounds elsewhere too in these poems. “Evangelism 101” plays with the Gospel scene of the disciples casting their nets for fish and Jesus responding “Soon you’ll be fishing for men.” Then through an unusual sequence of images (nothing in Goodyear’s poetry is predictable), the poem ends with this one, spoken to God:

Send us home with winnings enough
to celebrate, take our wives out
for scampi or oysters on the half shell,
offering their flesh to our teeth.

Here the flesh that’s “offered” (a sacrificial image) is of shellfish. In the poem “Christ is Risen, But” it is worms. They “dig tunnels, / crawl in, crawl out of the doubter’s mouth.” An unsavory image, but what it leads into is a meditation on doubt and faith. The final words of the poem could be an epigraph for Goodyear’s book: “Where the mystery is / too great, give us flesh.”

That line-break enacts the poem’s—and the entire volume’s—meaning. We hang at the end of “Where the mystery is”…as if the mystery could be located, pinpointed, held. But then, ah, we swing into the final line’s all-important qualifier: “where the mystery is too great.”

And that’s when the thematic plea of Barbies at Communion is uttered with absolute clarity: “give us flesh.”

Here is a poet for whom the Incarnation is real. And really delight-full.