saints of little faith

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.＂

Megan Pinto’s poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Poets & Writers, and The Peace Studio. She lives in New York City.