Poetry. LGBT Studies. Winner of Tupelo Press's Snowbound Chapbook Award selected by Dana Levin. Stacey Waite's THE LAKE HAS NO SAINT is a study in grief--a work of poetic archaeology that traces the artifacts of the past into the relationships of the present. Embedded in a powerfully modulated sequence addressing a "you" who shifts in location and identity, many of these poems feel like forms of request, imploring. The speaker's androgynous self-awareness--and wary attention to the gendered assumptions elicited by bodies--disclose in each poem a recognizable but disorienting (and pressurized) situation. THE LAKE HAS NO SAINT will unsettle a reader's sense of the certainty and stability of gender, as grammar and phrasing are also disrupted and blurred, often requiring us to read closely to hear where one sentence ends as another begins. Yet despite its formal and thematic iconoclasm, this is a book that clearly elucidates a story both heart-rending and ultimately--in its vatic honesty--triumphant.

Stacey Waite is originally from Long Island, New York. S/he majored in English at Bucknell University and earned an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. S/he now teaches courses in Composition, Gender Studies, and Literature and Creative Writing as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Waite has published three collections of poems: THE LAKE HAS NO SAINT (Tupelo Press, 2010), Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007), and Choke (Thorngate Road, 2004), winner of the Frank O'Hara Prize. Recent poems have been published in Bloom, The Marlboro Review, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, and Knockout.