Description:
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."
Review Quotes:
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