Optional Saint

Author: Kelsi Vanada

Publisher: Bench Books (2025)

The witty, playful poems in Optional Saint stretch sound to sound as they probe the intersections of creativity, translation, religion, and sexuality with curiosity and elasticity, asking: What do we inherit through family, language, and tradition, and what do we create anew? What happens when the sacred and profane collide? Here, nothing is fixed or reasonable, and transformation is an unending process: “A poem is only true in the moment, / and not in the next one.”