About the Book
Michael M. Weinstein's debut poetry collection, Saint Consequence, meditates on the body as a site of continuous change--both painful and beautiful, elected and imposed--to explore the often tangled journeys of physical and spiritual transformation.
What does it mean to inhabit a body--and for that body to inhabit our shared world, in all its complexity? Saint Consequence attempts to mine the gap between a life seen from the outside and the realities of a life lived. Influenced by time spent living in Siberia, Weinstein draws on experiences spanning gender transition, chronic illness, and disability to explore the tensions between public perception and private truth.
Ever wary of the temptation "to make a career of pain," (Adrienne Rich), these poems instead weave together personal experience and cross-cultural perspectives to invite us to reimagine our place in the world with greater nuance and compassion. Equally a personal reckoning and universal meditation on the complexities of identity, Saint Consequence expands from an examination of one man's singular experience of embodiment into a broader contemplation of the endless particularities of lives other than our own.
About the Author :
MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN is a transgender, crip poet, scholar, essayist, and photographer. His writing has appeared in venues such as The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poets.org. A former MFA candidate and Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, he holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard and formerly served as a Fulbright scholar in Siberia. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Earlham College. He lives in Richmond, IN.
Review :
Recommended by Debutiful
"In the space they take up, these poems offer a glimpse into the speaker's deepest vulnerabilities. This debut reads like the hand of the past reaching into the present, ushering us forward like the lover pushing aside the crutch."
--Amanda Hawkins, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Saint Consequence's beauty lies in its careful examination and analysis of the world's and of existence's precariousness. Each poem is a world that contains other worlds. Most of all, it is courageous, and Weinstein's poetry offers a speaker brave enough to imagine and then reimagine their place in the world."
--Nicole Yurcaba, Bear Review
"Saint Consequence is a book of 21st century transits--out of an iconic American childhood, towards the culture and language of Russia, out of one gender and into another. Such journeys, rich but estranging, require daring. Daring on the daily (the work of poetry) asks for discipline, and for this, Michael M. Weinstein shows a great capacity--from the connective pleasures of sonnet sequence to the playfulness of exquisite self-made forms to the ritual powers of repetition and rhyme. Saint Consequence asks speech to bend, to reach, to double back--not to hold, or to fix, but to move and even celebrate. Weinstein's debut claims from our English not simply the legitimacy of self-expression, but the force (and value) of excess and extravagance. I admire this collection's bravery, but I am in thrall to its winning sense of adventure, its grand and generous heart: 'It's the maybe // that keeps me.'"
--Katie Peterson
"Worlds within worlds, and each of them a world of pain: the radioactive topsoil on a Siberian farm, a brother's blighted being-in-the-world, life-altering illness, and the loss entailed ('the girl I killed') in even the most courageous assertion of selfhood. How is it, then, that the poems within this extraordinary volume should be so deeply heartening? Consummate musicianship and the freshest gift for image I have seen in many a long year play their part of course. But the deepest vein of beauty in Saint Consequence lies in quality of mind and heart: poetry's sturdiest counterargument to the erosions of time and chance."
--Linda Gregerson
"'Nobody else/ like us existed, ' this poet remembers midway through his shocking and delightful debut. 'And we were everywhere.' That's how it felt; that's how it still feels, sometimes, and it's one of many feelings that these personal, intellectual, challenging, sometimes terrifying poems 'at the edge/ of knowledge' (note the half-rhyme) get right. Mourning and transmasculinity, 'language infection' and loneliness, days in hospital and days in deserts, introspection and the sometimes desperate, muscular wish to connect, time in Siberia (literally) and a childhood of suburban American gloss: these things (as one one of Weinstein's precursors declares) are the materials, come as they will in the Yeatsian, anti-Yeatsian 'coat of an unsharable/ disease, its too-long sleeves/ dragging over all that ground the old anthems/ called common.' The collection he makes speaks as no one else can: full of absence and ghosts, spare with becoming, each page not so much 'an embossed copy/ of an irrecoverable self' as an incarnation, a way through this yearning and difficult life."
--Stephanie Burt
