FRONT COVER_Saints of Little Faith (1).jpg
FRONT COVER_Saints of Little Faith (1).jpg

Saints of Little Faith

£16.99

by Megan Pinto

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.”

by Megan Pinto

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.”

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£80.99

ISBN: 9781068751547
82 pages
Date published: 06/11/2025
Paperback

For fans of: Victoria Chang, Hannah Copley, Mona Arshi

PRAISE:

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

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

How steady these survival notes are, hemmed in by the deepest silence imaginable to track rising fears in families, in big cities; for young or old, an acute loneliness. Yet there is solace just by saying, and brave of this poet to put it all out there. —Marianne Boruch

In these sharply resonant poems, Megan Pinto writes with grace and precision about self-discovery, grief, desire, and existential yearning. Each poem is finely crafted by a poet of incredible skill and vast expanses of feeling. I thought my sorrow could transform me, Pinto writes. I have no doubt it will transform readers of this outstanding collection as well. —Matthew Olzmann

Megan Pinto’s poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Poets & Writers, and The Peace Studio. She lives in New York City.

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