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Saint with a Peacock Voice

Thursday, August 13, 2026
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Cover of Saint with a Peacock Voice

Saint with a Peacock Voice is a poetry collection made out of 100 percent recycled material culled from the collected works of Flannery O鈥機onnor (minus the two novels). Each poem harvests language exclusively from a particular O鈥機onnor 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鈥機onnor 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鈥機onnor鈥檚 oeuvre like some tomb raider. The opposite is true. The aim is to deepen the readers鈥� experience with the texture of her material while also demonstrating that language is a renewable resource. The words O鈥機onnor uses鈥攅veryone uses鈥攃an 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.