Saint with a Peacock Voice

<h2>What People Are Saying</h2><p>L. S. Klatt's <em>Saint with a Peacock Voice</em> is such a fascinating and rewarding experiment! Part cento part erasure part collaboration part puppet show (though is Klatt puppeteering O'Connor or is O'Connor puppeteering Klatt?) these poems cohere into a pure mysterious lyric mindscape an exploration of how language is always fundamentally both interior and shared. The O'Connor we find in these poems can be our contemporary addressing such things as 9/11 and global warming and the Klatt we encounter can't help but return obsessively to O'Connor's complex and stark views on God. I've never read a book quite like this before in which two minds wear each other and each other's language in such a sustained way. The result is a true deepening and enlarging of what the lyric can be. -<strong>Wayne Miller</strong></p><p></p><p>I can well imagine the poet savoring O'Connor's idiom phrasings and rhythms as he combs through the work to find words to suit his purposes. The result is a bell-choir of language unearthed from its original context and set into the ground of another. Now we have a collection of cranky poems that long for spiritual answers. Of course those answers don't arrive but the implied questions lurking behind the poems make themselves known by their absence and the absence is a rich reward. This book puts me in mind of Marianne Moore and her fantastic beasts and also of Wallace Stevens's philosophical inquiries of the absurd. These are strange and beautiful poems carefully wrought and attendant to all measures of reverence. This is a transcendent and illuminating book sharp and penetrating in all ways. The poems linger with the reader sometimes with a lull and sometimes with a twitch as they should. -<strong>Maurice Manning</strong></p><p></p><p>In <em>Saint with a Peacock Voice</em> L. S. Klatt wrenches surprise from the familiar-which after all is one of the things poetry ought to do maybe the thing. However with regard to familiarity-if Klatt didn't declare that the poems are all (something like) remixes of pieces Flannery O'Connor wrote the reader might not know. Nor does one find chopped-up prose here even though strictly speaking that's what these poems are. Here instead are new exciting poems that are yet afterlives of writing that came before them. These poems are doubly alive. -<strong>Shane McCrae</strong></p><p> </p><p><em>Saint with a Peacock Voice</em> is a fascinating study in the beauty and possibility of poetic constraint. These fine-wrought lyrics built from Flannery O'Connor's ecstatic lexicon are full of new music and spiritual depth. Poem by poem we witness a keenly attentive exploratory speaker emerge from the dense thicket of received language. I admire this poignant & particular voice as it celebrates & grieves for our troubled world making a violent butterfly something strange and gold. -<strong>Kiki Petrosino</strong></p><p></p><h2>About the Author</h2><p>L.S. Klatt's first book <em>Interloper</em> won the Juniper Prize awarded by the University of Massachusetts Press. His second <em>Cloud of Ink</em> garnered the Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press. <em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Sunshine Wound</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> was published by Parlor Press in 2015. </span>Klatt lives and works in Grand Rapids Michigan where he formerly served as poet laureate of the city.</p><p></p><p></p>