Saints of Little Faith
Published on 6. November 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
81 pages
978-1-0687515-4-7 (ISBN)
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 recognises 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 / anaesthetised, 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."
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 recognises 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 / anaesthetised, 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."
Reviews / Votes
In this collection, Pinto speaks directly about addiction, domestic and sexual violence, grief, and desire while acknowledging the double cultural taboo of these subjects, both within English canon and within South Asian diasporic families like her own. -Asa Drake for Split Lip Magazine These poems are tough, self-questioning and often bullish in the way they offer raw emotional responses to contemporary issues. -Rupert Loydell, Litter MagazineMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 153 mm
Width: 234 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
148 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-0687515-4-7 (9781068751547)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, published by the87press (2025, UK) and Four Way Books (2024, US). Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers' Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.