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Saints of Little Faith
- Narrated by: Megan Pinto
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Saints of Little Faith
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Publisher's Summary
The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction—as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.”
What the critics say
In Saints of Little Faith by Megan Pinto, these are beautifully rendered ruminative and thoughtful coming- of-age poems populated with people, such as the speaker’s ill father and past lovers, miniature narratives, and small fragments that pass by and become a line, as if the reader is on a train at twilight. These are poems of longing and growing at once. Perhaps in these poems, longing and growing are the same thing, or at least in the same hemisphere. These are both poems and holes, where the speaker’s language attempts to fill the void with its painful music, as in the poem “Tunneling,” where the speaker is blanketed by language, while it softened all wailing into song. —Victoria Chang
Megan Pinto’s title, Saints of Little Faith, might—as they say—say it all. Because her austere, unnerving poems (I am calm. Like a serial killer) do read a little like prayers. Or like unspeakable aubades eked out before dawn. How steady these survival notes are, hemmed in by the deepest silence imaginable to track rising fears in families, in big cities; for young or old, an acute loneliness. Yet there is solace just by saying, and brave of this poet to put it all out there. But this book is also a thing rare in poetry, wonderfully what Erza Pound demanded a century ago: poems must be at least as interesting as prose. That’s largely Pinto’s weaving small shocks, heart-stopping story into her beautifully made lyric poems. And sudden overlooks into their chasms. At night, I stare into the dark, and darkness stares into me, this poet tells us. How the mind searches, restless and in vain, she says. Stunned, we watch that mind discover itself until O, heart—a new day as eyes open to an empty room. Or until, like light breaks / across the East River ... love / does not so much come to me as / move through me. —Marianne Boruch
In these sharply resonant poems, Megan Pinto writes with grace and precision about self-discovery, grief, desire, and existential yearning. Each poem is finely crafted by a poet of incredible skill and vast expanses of feeling. I thought my sorrow could transform me, Pinto writes. I have no doubt it will transform readers of this outstanding collection as well. —Matthew Olzmann