Saint October

Reviews / Votes

"In the beginning there was...[a] glossolalia of iridescence." The stars spoke us into existence, but we forgot how to listen. Lindsey Warren's beautiful poems speak in tongues, reminding us that we are made of stardust. "There are spaces to cross. All within you," she writes. Returning the poem to its origin in song, Warren offers us a new kind of vesper, one that praises soul and solar system alike. "A god travels in me and I grow dark," but it is in this darkness that stars become visible. If the night were a saint, Saint October would be its treatise. I urge you to read it." - Sasha Steensen, author of Well and Everything Awake "Lucie Brock-Broido said that the magic of a book of poetry usually occurs in threes . . . I believe wholly in the slim volume of verse, I believe in the slim everything, I like the trees to be slim in October. Lindsey Warren's Saint October is just such a three-part, sixty-some-odd-page wonder, populated by poems that Celan their way through compound neologisms (beebrown! wormchews! transblue!!), living largely on Quadrant II of the page-that top-left corner, negative in one dimension, insuppressibly positive in the other. Warren's poems are spoken from the inflection point between ecology and astronomy, reminding us that the gaps "between released / leaves" partake of the same void as "heaven's black cabinets" and the "alongside of human stars that whirl / and feel you"-and how feeling, too, is a function of those gaps between atoms that we don't even traverse when we touch. As one poem's speaker has it, "I wrestle / it until / it blesses / me"-and though we're not the angel in the ring, we can hear the singing, the "Seeping", these divine 'sounds / in the eye.'" - Tom Snarsky, author of Reclaimed Water and Light-Up Swan

"In Saint October, Warren showcases a mastery over language that creates intricate sculptures of words. Dizzying in the best way. She is my nominee for the poet-laureate of the quantum or the macrocosm, but probably both. Terrifying and profound. Warren builds poems like a hadron collider." - Paul K. Tunis, author of The Open Door

"Saint October is a book devoted to the religion of phenomena, wherein we find ourselves forever in transit to what is Next. Just as October itself lives on a hinge between summer and winter, so does the intrepid pilgrim journeying throughout this gorgeous book cast away anything that hints at permanence. Saint October is a devotional tour-de-force wherein Lindsay Warren proves that the imminence of being is available anywhere, once we give up the dream of possessing it." - Claudia Keelan, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, editor of Interim, author of eight collections of poetry, including We Step into the Sea