the lake has no saint

$19.95

by Stacey Waite

Stacey Waite’s the lake has no saint is a study in grief — a work of poetic archaeology that traces the artifacts of the past into the relationships of the present.

Embedded in a powerfully modulated sequence addressing a “you” who shifts in location and identity, many of these poems feel like forms of request, imploring. The speaker’s androgynous self-awareness — and wary attention to the gendered assumptions elicited by bodies — disclose in each poem a recognizable but disorienting (and pressurized) situation.

the lake has no saint will unsettle a reader’s sense of the certainty and stability of gender, as grammar and phrasing are also disrupted and blurred, often requiring us to read closely to hear where one sentence ends as another begins. Yet despite its formal and thematic iconoclasm, this is a book that clearly elucidates a story both heart-rending and ultimately — in its vatic honesty — triumphant.

by Stacey Waite

Stacey Waite’s the lake has no saint is a study in grief — a work of poetic archaeology that traces the artifacts of the past into the relationships of the present.

Embedded in a powerfully modulated sequence addressing a “you” who shifts in location and identity, many of these poems feel like forms of request, imploring. The speaker’s androgynous self-awareness — and wary attention to the gendered assumptions elicited by bodies — disclose in each poem a recognizable but disorienting (and pressurized) situation.

the lake has no saint will unsettle a reader’s sense of the certainty and stability of gender, as grammar and phrasing are also disrupted and blurred, often requiring us to read closely to hear where one sentence ends as another begins. Yet despite its formal and thematic iconoclasm, this is a book that clearly elucidates a story both heart-rending and ultimately — in its vatic honesty — triumphant.

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Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award

“Syntax — the arrangement of words in a sentence, the arrangement of rules in a system — is exactly how the mind linguistically organizes its self-expression. This is lake’s genius (and Ashbery’s, too, though he uses it to very different effect): to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence — to get around English’s pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and.”

—Dana Levin, The Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

Stacey Waite is the author of three collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O’Hara Prize), Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007), and the lake has no saint (winner of Tupelo’s 2008 Snowbound Chapbook Award). With both an M.F.A. in poetry and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh, Waite now teaches courses in writing, gender studies, and pedagogy as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Advanced Praise

“the lake has no saint pulls most of its strength from relationships, so when Waite’s language gets slippery, or wriggles out of perfect coherence, it is because relationships—even without the speaker’s autonomous piecing together of a gender identity—are slippery, wriggling, incoherent things.”—PJ Gallo, Coldfront Magazine

“Waite’s voice in this collection is characteristically unwavering in tone: driven, plaintive, daring. One might imagine this steadiness tiresome, but the opposite is true, given the poet’s Woolf-like switchbacking between outward description and the mind’s reflections.” —Erin M. Bertram, Rain Taxi

“Waite’s poetic gift lies in the choice of details for each poem—an ability to put a finger on a near-synesthetic instant of perception and let that little detail break your heart with hardly an overt expression of emotion.” —Jocelyn Heath, Lambda Literary

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-81-1