About
While historically Saint Monica is the patron of wives, alcoholics, abuse victims, and numerous combinations thereof, poet Mary Biddinger brings us a modern day reinvention: a Rust Belt girl fraught with dilemmas of desire, and privy to the mystical elements of the world. Saint Monica lets the holy (and unholy) unfold against a backdrop of the post-industrial American Midwest, in poems both rich with prose and pared down to lyric filaments. Biddinger explores the intersection between everyday life and saintly inclination, departing from hagiography in order to situate the heroine in a world of county fairs and awkward school dances, uncanny clairvoyance and unmitigated longing. These are poems for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty of a collapsed barn, or hoped for a new patron saint.