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