Without Saints

<p><span style=color: rgba(59 49 49 1)>WITHOUT SAINTS is a breathtaking journey to rediscover hope between the ruins: Poet Christopher Locke was baptized by Pentecostals absolved by punk rock and nearly consumed by narcotics. Like Denis Johnson's propulsive </span><em style=color: rgba(59 49 49 1)>Jesus' Son</em><span style=color: rgba(59 49 49 1)> Without Saints is a brief muscular ride into the heart of American desolation and the love one finds waiting for them instead.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span>??</span>This slim volume of essays packs a dense punch propelled like a carnival ride through Locke's Pentecostal upbringing to his years as a drug-experimenting teen punk to his teaching career family and intermittent struggles with substance abuse. Every scene is taut like a highwire the only steady presence Locke's lyrical quiet prose. Locke knows how to make the ordinary feel fantastical and the fantastical ordinary. -Jen Michalski author of <em>The Tide King</em> and <em>The Summer She Was Under Water</em></p><p><br></p><p>Haunting and understated Christopher Locke chronicles the secrets that bedevil every extended family. -David L . Marcus winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of <em>What it Takes to Pull Me Through</em></p><p><br></p><p>Christopher Locke's WITHOUT SAINTS is an intimate and lyrical book of essays that begins with vivid and wondrous memories of childhood into early adulthood's ambivalence around a worrying drug use into the intimacies of being a husband and a father. And finally into two of the book's knockouts: a beautiful remembrance of the poet and writer Donald Hall and a probing look at what it's like to teach a creative writing workshop inside the walls of a federal prison. Locke's writing is up close and personal and brave-always revealing always acknowledging the tenderness and melancholy of living out loud. -Michael Klein author of <em>Track Conditions</em></p>