Saint Serotonin. Poems on Love and Madness

The award-winning author of Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head returns with a poetry collection of chemical intensity, where love—or the fever-dream of it—threatens to consume the most precious parts of a self. "Ya Allah if it / will keep my heart soft please break / my heart everyday." A woman meets a man. She carries, as we all do, the weight of her childhood, the story of her parents, the body she was born into. Endorphins race within her—he is beautiful, she is beautiful, their love is fated. But what comes next? Warsan Shire is beloved for her anthems of a diasporic generation: poems giving voice to those scattered by war, to the hidden conversations between women that helped them survive. In Saint Serotonin, the solace of community and a sure sense of self fall away, as the world narrows to a single, ferocious flame of obsession. With the cold eye of an anatomist, Shire paints an uncompromising portrait of a woman in love, from the jitters of infatuation to the ecstatic wager of losing oneself in another: "The only side effect is / nothing will ever be enough." These are poems of reckless intoxication, tuned to desire’s contradictory faces: devotion, abasement,…

Издательство

Penguin

Год

2027

Язык

английский

ISBN

9781037801082