The Lives of the Saints
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The Lives of the Saints

Suzanne Paola

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eBook - ePub

The Lives of the Saints

Suzanne Paola

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About This Book

The image of the rose winds through the book, symbol of eternity and transience, gravity and folly. We find it in the ghastly bloom of the atomic bomb, in the relic of St. Therese of Lisieux, in the wool of a cloned sheep. Its image glows silently under the Waste Isolation Projects of Yucca Mountain and New Mexico, in the U.S. Human Radiation Experiments, in the altars constructed at the schoolyard gate of the Columbine massacre. The poems -- witty, sly, sensitive, and immensely informed -- trace the spiritual inquiries of a series of linked personae adrift in bodies and a world made toxic by the residues of scientific experimentation. Paola's dramatic monologues begin and end with the same fictional narrator, a wry, cynical, cake-baking woman who, on learning of the atomic structure of all matter, begins a lifetime of questioning. At times blasphemous, at times poignant and humorous, these voices are never less than heartbreakingly human, and the words they utter chill with their honesty. The Lives of the Saints is a stark, wise, meticulously researched book by a writer whose reputation leaps forward with each publication.

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Information

Year
2016
ISBN
9780295806952

CaterĂ­natĂ­

All the way to heaven is heaven.
—St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)
Her followers were called Caterinati, or else the Beautiful Brigade.

Lily

When I say there was a normal world I stepped back into
I mean I could almost see the door:
a glass door, a doorknob of cold crystal,
a door swung wide by eating yellow cake.
(Not the fishing weights I once sewed in the hem
of my pants. Not the cup after
cup of water.) Once I walked through
I saw how absurd I’d been on the other side of it,
a loose wire in sweatpants, wingbones
jutting from my cheeks, my face wanting to fly off.
It astonishes me: there are so many normal people.
Without thinking much they put on their normal clothes
that serve as a warm introduction to one another.
And their fat furniture & humped
cars. They don’t
have to think about it they just
like the same things. The kind of TV
where people are moving bones with a light jelly on them
& they meet in restaurants & quip & eat. Or rather
they order steaks & half chickens, chew
one well-amplified bite, & laughingly go home.
That’s not real, my doctor says, but I watch
the real, offscreen tables of untouched meat.

About Catherine

“Always mostly immersed in the supernatural”
living survivor of a dead twin, her long hair
the blond of milkfat,
at twelve she takes her father the dyer’s scissors & flut flut flut
the fall scirocco’s a sneeze of hair—
Her mother takes her to a hot spring: she finds one
that’s 200° & bubbles holes in her skin.
Now that she’s mineral she’ll no longer eat.
Only God can marry me after this, she says, thinking God
takes what he gets, not choosy.
Then comes the three years in her little cell
at home, the mechanical
raising & lowering of her arm, its brief
whip-tentacle. Like she was
a gizmo, a 19th-century
itinerant’s contraption,
the brass monkey’s arm
shoveling its throat with coin.

Madame M.

The hair shirt. The spiked girdle & the iron chain.
Herself dom
& sub, fantasy & fulfillment.
We call ourselves players & in the animal world
play is always a predatory act. Who leads, who
feeds? The one who gives pain
knows precisely what to give, the one who takes
plays the minor chords of his body as he wants to.
He will call me Mistress a word that is power & powerlessness like saint.
I have a den with an oak Magnavox I lock away
& then I throw open a cupboard & call it
dungeon. It’s always
the powerful men who want this, & they’re exact.
Losing control the way an architect dynamites
a building, so it falls
this way. In dog collar, nipple clamp, cuffs & rope
like each piece of what you are must be separately stopped.

Lily

She chewed & chewed lettuce & celery then spat them out.
Tickled her throat
with a feather, saying
Let’s bring the miserable sinners up for judgment. (I
had no arguments, or nothing could have made me eat.)
Wore the Dominican habit & stayed at home
in a nine-foot cell, with her prayers & her beatings, a willed
& shuddering singularity. She sculpted her body down
to the real woman: I always felt
five pounds away from myself.
I remember the deaths of the Kennedys & a woman
named Jeane: she predicted them, & then
blithered on through the next thirty years—
World War III, Russia beating us to the moon.
Cosmic peace & harmony, all
before 2000. Everything & everyone in history
will be right once or twice, like a
stopped clock. & then go lunatic.

Madame M.

I love to garden. No one
believes this. I joke: my plants are black & blue,
& bloodred of course . . .
Not true. I like columbines & cosmos, all the pastelly shades
of innards if you washed them in a sink of milk.
Not roses, with their thorns & rust.
I joke: they’re the dominants
of the garden, I won’t have competition.
Wrong, they’re subs, in control
thr...

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