Presenting Violence without Replicating It: On Megan Pinto’s Saints of Little Faith
Throughout Megan Pinto’s debut collection, Saints of Little Faith, runs a wild, looped, and knotted thread of memory. Where “Rumi speaks of sorrow as a clearing / of leaves, making space for joy,” Pinto explores the possibility that “Maybe like everything, healing has a season, dormant, but rooting.” Saints is a collection that orbits the question of closeness (“All my life, I wanted to be close”) in terms of proximity, in terms of intimacy. And that which obstructs intimacy, Saints has us approach slowly and with full recognition. In this collection, Pinto speaks directly about addiction, domestic and sexual violence, grief, and desire while acknowledging the double cultural taboo of these subjects, both within English canon and within South Asian diasporic families like her own.
I often question how we can be explicit about formative events in our lives, which are so often shaped by misunderstanding and violence, without reproducing the isolation of these moments. How can we present the forces that make us without turning the reader away, without losing closeness? In Pinto’s poem, “Summer of Green and Nectar,” she lays out a relationship with the speaker’s mother that becomes a mirror to her relationship with the reader:
in my dormitory, I wrote down things
I could never say, like when
he entered me, I would beg
to someone inside my mind
for him to just speak to me again, or how
at lunch, to keep some peace
I would undress, instead of eating
let him move his hands
over me. But all this
my mother did not notice
The speaker is explicit about both an action and a desire, but in the mother’s reading, only the action comes into focus. So when the mother asks “why this happened and how and what God” regarding a cousin’s death, we must recognize that the explicit (of why and how) may be present but not perceived. And yet this oversight isn’t from lack of care. I’m interested in how the title of this poem, “Summer of Green and Nectar,” calls back to a thought exercise the mother offers early in the collection. The speaker relays, “When I was small, my mother taught me to count / all the different shades of green I could see. She was trying to calm me.” These greens return again and again throughout the collection—fields, mint, emerald, and each sighting offers a new opportunity for care, for closeness. Language can be concrete, an amulet passed down from one woman to another. It’s this enumeration, this practice of holding language and revisiting it with greater specificity that makes Saints of Little Faith a unique composition, uncompromising and still tender in its depiction of human relationships.
In a conversation with Hiba Tahir, Pinto describes that during the writing process, she would sometimes “pull all the language [she] didn’t use... into a new document and would try to assemble a poem from poem scraps.” She describes writing into the space that might not have worked in an earlier draft. I think this knowledge further clarifies that intentional care Pinto brings to the writing table—how each poem carries with it a past and present desire, a collaboration and a compassion towards a past self. The poem “Tonight, It Is Snowing in Rome” borrows its title from a college journal (the running title goes on to explain it’s “a line that I wrote in my notebook / inside my hotel in Prague”). Pinto revisits the voice of a younger self to confront now what she could not observe then.
If coming of age is a kind of hardening of the self, I’m interested in the risk of unsettling one’s recollection, in choosing to admit that our becoming isn’t a linear progression, but something more elliptical. While writing this essay, I struggled with a way to reproduce the care Pinto uses to shape a difficult subject. Almost every explicit act of violence is introduced in a prior, lesser form. Pinto first writes into the offing what readers will eventually approach; to prepare the reader for “Tonight, It Is Snowing in Rome,” the speaker first introduces the grandmother in the poem “In Heaven There Will Be No Bodies.” The running title elaborates on how bodies “exist to tempt us /and move us toward grace,” a grace which the speaker revisits:
When I think of grace,
I see my grandmother on the carpet
folded over at her knees.
When Pinto revisits this knowledge in “Tonight, It Is Snowing in Rome,” the overt sexual violence is not a discovery, but something the reader, too, has carried for some length of time:
…Before my grandmother died
there were signs. In Prague, the story I replayed
was from Mumbai: my grandmother bent over to get something
from the fridge, when she heard her caretaker unbuckle
his belt and unzip his pants, his waist closing in.
How should I prepare for all
the things I cannot see?
Pinto risks return—through language and memory—and also vulnerability. The speaker’s return to this subject becomes a gesture towards her relationship with the reader, who is not a voyeur but a confidante. When she writes “How should I prepare for all / the things I cannot see?”, a stanza break leaves room for the reader’s response and the impossibility of an answer. Once, my mother told me she didn’t want me to repeat her life, but she wanted me to recognize the possibility of repetition. Revisiting the journals, secrets and shame of a younger self, Pinto does not turn these lines into refrain, but questions. She expands the silence between them and invites us to look into what she describes as “my God- / sized hole, how / it widens / with each breath.”
Pinto offers the reader something disruptive in her approach. There’s care to how she circles back to violence, to how memory can be accurate and discursive, and this care becomes an invocation of her own authority:
A secret: I let a man undress me because he wouldn’t stop
kissing me, and though I found him to be beautiful, my mind moved
to light shining among trees, fields unfolding.
Pinto frequently discusses how “sorrow is cyclical.” The result being that the discursive is not a departure but a return to the green language her mother once used to calm a younger self, to Rumi’s “leaves, making space for joy.” Even her father’s quotation that “if you aim for the stars, / then you fall on the trees. / If you aim for the trees, then you fall / on the ground,” is caught “shining among the trees.” Language becomes a personal choice to return, and perhaps also the difference between volition and objectification. Perhaps language, like emotion, is enmeshed within the body, like the soul Pinto describes when she writes, “I ask a shaman to retrieve the lost parts / of my soul, but the shaman says no, / that my soul is intact, just / enmeshed.”
Saints of Little Faith is composed of three nearly equal sections, with the second section distinguished as a cohesive and untitled prose-adjacent sequence (in this essay, I’ll follow the table of contents’ example and refer to this 24-page poem as “Even in silence”). “Even in silence” focuses largely on the speaker’s father’s diminishing health and psychosis. If “[p]sychosis is cyclical, it crests like a wave,” so too does the speaker’s response which breaks from the more traditional poems in the first and third sections to embrace the ebb and rise of illness with formal fluidity.
When Pinto writes in “Even in silence” how her mother “says my father’s illness reminds her of her mother. Cut off from the / people she knew, my grandmother died alone,” we must read into this grief a secret about how the aging and fragile body is perceived. We enter this central grief of Saints through one loss opening into another. We know how “alone” breeds vulnerability. In this longest poem of the collection, the alternating left and right alignment of the text replicates the curtained partitions of the hospital room and also the cycle that repeats within those rooms:
Each time my father ends up in the emergency room, we repeat: a new
nurse will pull the curtains shut, as my father calls my name through the
pale, green sheet. The new nurse will ask me when this began and how
long, and why my father will not eat
Repetition is the rhythm of our grief.
The form of the poem creates small rooms, stanzas that allow the speaker to occupy her father’s loneliness, to share it and attenuate its flimsy partitions. I love how a long line in a long poem offers room for contemplation. Throughout Saints, Pinto explores the distance between thought and the body, and in this section-long poem, she gives herself the freedom to make of language something solid. Like the mother’s touchstone of enumerated greens, the father’s language calcifies into a monolith of italicized text. The poem becomes a kind of devotion, both recording how “[r]epetition is the rhythm of our grief” and interjecting into that repetition remnants of pleasure—the love song, the “fluttering heart,” the “grass divide.” In a poem that explores contemplation, Pinto takes care of the body—the speaker’s and the father’s. She tries to feed both. She revisits the possibility of the body as a vehicle to “move us towards grace” even when the destination may seem uncertain, even when “Sorrow is a circle.” It’s this care that creates a kind of threshold within the collection, an observable leap into the third and final section of Saint of Little Faith.
Pinto uses “sorrow” broadly and throughout Saints as a feeling akin to grief, to whatever might prevent closeness. In “Even in silence,” the word sorrow appears three times. But it’s one that shifts in meaning. Pinto can use the same word to describe a feeling and still distinguish its variations. When sorrow appears towards the end of the collection, in “It was the Winter of My Life,” it’s transportive, a way to protect the mind and the body:
My friend called to tell me about a neighbor
who cornered her in the stairwell
and kissed her. She described
standing perfectly still.
The shape of the lake nearing dusk,
its symmetrical, man-made enclosures.
Rumi speaks of sorrow as a clearing
of leaves, making space for joy. But what
to do with rage? And in such a desolate
landscape?
Invoking Rumi’s “sorrow as a clearing,” the speaker places her friend in a new landscape, “a clearing of leaves” taking the place of the cornered stairwell, the “symmetrical, man-made enclosures.” I’m interested in how these stanzas replicate the curtain-like rooms of “Even in silence,” how form shapes the question “But what / to do with rage? And in such a desolate / landscape?”
Earlier, I asked how can we present moments of violence without turning the reader away, though I think Saints culminates towards a more difficult question—how do we keep ourselves from turning away from “such a desolate / landscape”? Perhaps this kind of looking is also the body moving towards grace. When the speaker writes of “telling myself, you are not your thoughts, / but the watcher of your thoughts. / The watcher, watching over you,” this too is a kind of faith, an invocation, even if the self is the authority one most doubts.
Asa Drake (@asaldrake) is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. Her chapbook, One Way to Listen (Gold Line Press), is the winner of a 2023 Florida Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House, and Idyllwild Arts.
Megan Pinto (@megg_bean) is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, September 2024). Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, AAWW's The Margins, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Megan has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Storyknife, The Peace Studio and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Most recently, she received the 2023 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review and was selected for Poets & Writers 2024 Get the Word Out poetry cohort. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.