About the Book

While historically Saint Monica is the patron of wives, alcoholics, abuse victims, and numerous combinations thereof, poet Mary Biddinger brings us a modern day reinvention: a Rust Belt girl fraught with dilemmas of desire, and privy to the mystical elements of the world. Saint Monica lets the holy (and unholy) unfold against a backdrop of the post-industrial American Midwest, in poems both rich with prose and pared down to lyric filaments. Biddinger explores the intersection between everyday life and saintly inclination, departing from hagiography in order to situate the heroine in a world of county fairs and awkward school dances, uncanny clairvoyance and unmitigated longing. These are poems for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty of a collapsed barn, or hoped for a new patron saint.

Praise

Equally familiar and strange in her wonderment, Mary Biddinger’s Saint Monica rises above the water towers and smokestacks of the Midwest, a saint transfigured into a modern girl with a persistent craving for muscle cars and tattooed love boys. Yet this Saint Monica does more than want; her yearnings are feral, carnal, and unflinchingly honest. She does not ask for God to take her walls away so much as figure out how to kick them down herself. The result: her escape route is illuminated by a slender and elegant beam of longing and melancholy in poems that make clear the clandestine nature of what we desire most.

--Steve Kistulentz, author of The Luckless Age

Mary Biddinger evokes the patron saint of female abuse victims in narrating the adolescence of a latter day Saint Monica. Ironic humor illuminates the poems, as in “Saint Monica Stays the Course,” a hilarious catechism of teeth-gritting endurance. Biddinger crisply narrates these memorable tales that entwine horror and sensual discovery, using deft rhythms, head-snapping line breaks, and highly original imagery.

--Rachel Dacus, author of Femme au Chapeau and Earth Lessons

About the Author

Mary Biddinger’s Saint Monica was a finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is also the author of the poetry collection Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (University of Akron Press, 2011). Her poetry has recently appeared in 32 Poems, The Collagist, Copper Nickel, Devil’s Lake, diode, Gulf Coast, North American Review, Passages North, Waccamaw, and many others. She is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, co-editor-in-chief of Barn Owl Review, Associate Professor of English at the University of Akron, and director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Saint Monica was made possible by the generosity of the Ohio Arts Council, which has awarded Biddinger two Individual Excellence Awards in poetry over the past several years. Biddinger’s second full-length collection of poems, O Holy Insurgency, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012. Visit her website at http://www.marybiddinger.com. 

SAINT MONICA OF THE GAUZE

The room is red with iodine. Her ears stop

and her thighs slacken against

the bed. The owls would like to unwrap

her, as owls do, always looking

for the next loose shutter, the goldfinch

bathing in a pile of spilled parmesan

in the convenience store parking lot.

She explains a few things. Static

wracks the telephone line, a dry tornado 

on the helipad after a freeway crash.

The linoleum has seen years of other feet

and beds rolling in and out, how

they hauled her from the gurney as if

she weighed something other

than what was left. They ask: but what

about your Cleveland flowering pear

trees, or the creeping vinca, the clematis

your husband promised to burn if it

came back? They say that she will get out.

There will be time and muscle 

enough for hanging wet towels on a line.

Article Title

ISBN: 978-0-9828766-1-9

Price: $9

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