L. S. Klatt

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978-1-64317-501-0 (paperback, $14.95); 978-1-64317-502-7 (PDF, $9.95); 978-1-64317-503-4 (EPUB, $9.95). © 2025 by Parlor Press, 86 pages.

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What People Are Saying

L. S. Klatt’s Saint with a Peacock Voice is such a fascinating and rewarding experiment! Part cento, part erasure, part collaboration, part puppet show (though is Klatt puppeteering O’Connor, or is O’Connor puppeteering Klatt?), these poems cohere into a pure, mysterious lyric mindscape, an exploration of how language is always fundamentally both interior and shared. The O’Connor we find in these poems can be our contemporary, addressing such things as 9/11 and global warming, and the Klatt we encounter can’t help but return obsessively to O’Connor’s complex and stark views on God. I’ve never read a book quite like this before, in which two minds wear each other and each other’s language in such a sustained way. The result is a true deepening and enlarging of what the lyric can be. —Wayne Miller

I can well imagine the poet savoring O’Connor’s idiom, phrasings, and rhythms, as he combs through the work to find words to suit his purposes. The result is a bell-choir of language, unearthed from its original context and set into the ground of another. Now we have a collection of cranky poems that long for spiritual answers. Of course, those answers don’t arrive, but the implied questions lurking behind the poems make themselves known by their absence, and the absence is a rich reward. This book puts me in mind of Marianne Moore and her fantastic beasts, and also of Wallace Stevens’s philosophical inquiries of the absurd. These are strange and beautiful poems, carefully wrought and attendant to all measures of reverence. This is a transcendent and illuminating book, sharp and penetrating in all ways. The poems linger with the reader, sometimes with a lull and sometimes with a twitch, as they should. —Maurice Manning

In Saint with a Peacock Voice, L. S. Klatt wrenches surprise from the familiar—which, after all, is one of the things poetry ought to do, maybe the thing. However, with regard to familiarity—if Klatt didn't declare that the poems are all (something like) remixes of pieces Flannery O’Connor wrote, the reader might not know. Nor does one find chopped-up prose here, even though, strictly speaking, that’s what these poems are. Here, instead, are new, exciting poems that are yet afterlives of writing that came before them. These poems are doubly alive. —Shane McCrae
 
Saint with a Peacock Voice is a fascinating study in the beauty and possibility of poetic constraint. These fine-wrought lyrics, built from Flannery O'Connor's ecstatic lexicon, are full of new music and spiritual depth. Poem by poem, we witness a keenly attentive, exploratory speaker emerge from the dense thicket of received language. I admire this poignant & particular voice as it celebrates & grieves for our troubled world, making "a violent butterfly, something strange and gold." —Kiki Petrosino

Description

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. 

About the Author

L.S. Klatt’s poetry has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, The Believer, Best American Poetry, Image, The Common, The Southern Review, and The New Yorker. His first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize, awarded by the University of Massachusetts Press. His second, Cloud of Ink, garnered the Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press. Sunshine Wound was published by Parlor Press in 2015. He also has published essays on poets, most recently “Kenneth Koch, Cincinnatian, Poet of Confetti” in The Cincinnati Review and “Blue Buzz, Blue Guitar: Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Noisemaking” in The Georgia Review. Klatt lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he formerly served as poet laureate of the city.