Publications

Saint with a Peacock Voice is a poetry collection made out of 100 percent recycled material culled from the collected works of Flannery O’Connor (minus the two novels). Each poem harvests language exclusively from a particular O’Connor story, essay, or letter, and recasts a subset of these words (unaltered for tense, number, or grammar) into lyric expression, specifically couplets. The poems are not intended merely to restate what O’Connor has delivered already so potently in dramatic or expository form but to explore what else her diction, in the mouth of another, might want to say. The poems, then, are not erasures or paraphrases; rather, they recycle and rearrange selected words available in the texts. The intention has not been to disrespect or loot O’Connor’s oeuvre like some tomb raider. The opposite is true. The aim is to deepen the readers’ experience with the texture of her material while also demonstrating that language is a renewable resource. The words O’Connor uses—everyone uses—can be replanted in new genres, new gardens. This collection celebrate the resilience of words, in this case, those words that appear to be spoken for (used up) and therefore taken out of circulation but which, in fact, are still fecund.